Plan International Advises Youths On Meaningful Ventures

Youths have been charged to channel their energy towards meaningful ventures that would foster development.

The Country Director, Plan International, Mr. Charles Usie gave the advice at a Youth Advisory Panel of Plan International Nigeria to celebrate this year’s International Youths Day in Abuja.

The program was tagged: “The Crucial Role of Education in Building Knowledge, Skills of Young Women and Adolescents’ Girls in Tackling Climate Change and Supporting Green Economy.”

Mr. Usie who stressed that leveraging on opportunities would build a viable economy explained that hard-working youths in Nigeria would thrive abroad while lazy youths would remain lazy abroad without changing the narrative.

He said the organization was creating an avenue for youths and young girls to ensure their voices are heard.

“We want to create a space that will enable young voices to be heard; we want to create a space that will enable us to join hands together and bring about the Nigeria of our dream. It is possible, it is actually possible in our lifetime.”

Plan International is interested in partnering with you, listening to you, let us hear your thoughts, let us hear your ideas together let’s change the country to the country we desire,” he said.

He added “The aim of this programme is to raise awareness about the opportunities and challenges faced by young people worldwide. This day celebrates the contributions, ideas, energy, and creativity of young people to foster positive change, not only for themselves but also for their communities and the rest of the world.”

“Plan International has a strong commitment to children’s rights and equality for girls and has been working in 50 developing Countries to promote social change through gender transformative programming and influencing.”

In their contributions, some youths at the forum while deliberating on the crucial role of education in building knowledge and skills of young women and adolescent girls in tackling climate change and supporting the green economy called for the inclusion of climate change in the school curriculum to ensure young people are taught on the importance of factors that would address the effect of climate change in the country.

One of the youths, Marwan Umar who is a member of the Nigerian Youth Parliament explained “We are trying to put forward recommendations for policies to include climate knowledge in the school curriculum at a basic level so as to involve more young people especially girls and adolescents for them to have basic knowledge of climate change.”

“We are also trying to ensure more civil society have more funding to create awareness on how to sensitize people at the grassroots on the need to be cautious of activities that lead to degradation in the country.”

Also, the chairperson of Plan International Nigeria’s Youth Advisory Panel, Faith Adaji stressed that “the Green skills for youth is the fact that we notice that most people think climate change is ambiguous.

“They don’t know how they can make climate change lucrative to the point that we have a green economy and to make the ecological system friendly and make the environment friendly for people to transact business.”

She added “The role of education in fostering and leveraging green economy for young women and girls is very important because they are always the once vulnerable”

In a goodwill message, a retired director in the Ministry of Education Mrs. Nkiru Osisioma advised the youths to discover their talents and use them judiciously to portray a good image of the country.

Florence Adewale