REPORT ON THE STATUS OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS IN LAGOS COMMUNITIES A SPEAK UP STAND OUT (SUSO) PROJECT

Protecting Vulnerable Children in Nigeria

We are happy to bring you a Report On The Status Of Children's Rights In Lagos Communities, led by #SpeakUpStandOut Activist Emediong Akpabio. 

Emediong Akpabio.: - Shares his SUSO Story, Read in his own words below. 

Before being selected for the SUSO program, I knew I wanted to understand the conditions children in Nigeria lived in. Still, I needed guidance and resources to understand where and how to begin.

We see children everywhere, and I ask myself," who takes care of these children"? Where do they stay, and what social mechanisms are in place for them? 

During the onboarding session in Abuja, a couple of training on community programming and campaign was taught, and I got a sense of why I needed to move from having this burden to research. 

At least I  knew if I ever needed support, I had a community of people with experience to help, and we put a team together for the work we are doing now.

I'm happy with our level of work. We took a lot of time to research and engaged with the community people—women, parents, and mothers themselves. We found out they were already so excited by just speaking to them. I hope that people are thinking about their deplorable condition and, potentially, can help. , So yes, we can help them, and we are working on the second phase of designing an Advocacy strategy with the data we have collected.

We feel a strong sense of purpose with our assessment and know how we want to help these children. We hope we can get all the support to them as quickly as possible, but we have to design an implementation strategy which is part of what we are putting together.

In the next few days, we will kick off a social media campaign, engaging with stakeholders, sharing a policy brief with their legislators, and meeting their representatives.

Our recommendation for the implementation team would be that they should review the impact of our work and seek more funding to enable us to meet the short-term humanitarian needs of these children while pursuing a long-term structural reform that would protect every child.

I have found a career and focus with this project and want to learn about "protecting children in emergencies." Children are in crisis, but we are not doing enough. If we have agencies for women and youth at the sub-national level, we need one devoted to the needs of children, and this is my proposal.