By Austin Ajayi, Yola
Worried by the increasing cases of violence against children in communities, the Adamawa State government in conjunction with international donor agencies, has commenced a five-day train the trainer workshop on how to curb the rising trend.
The training workshop which is targeted at volunteers from the local community is to equip them on how to handle cases of violence against the child.
According to Mrs Ladi Alabi, a child protection specialist, the workshop became necessary because most often there have been slow or non prosecution of the perpetrators of the dastardly act by relevant authorities both at the national, state and local levels.
She noted that it was because of this concern that social welfare workers in Adamawa state are undergoing a week long intensive training the trainer on ways to appropriately handle issues of child abuse in their respective communities as well as report the cases on the national dashboard to ensure better programming and intervention.
The training, she stressed, is to equip the participants with better knowledge and skills to better respond to cases of child abuse, violence against children and also provide better services to them.
The training is part of spotlight programme funded by the European Union and implemented by the United Nations and the Adamawa state government.
United Nation Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) Child Protection Specialist, Ladi Alabi who spoke to journalists at the event said “the participants were trained with the appropriate knowledge and skills to appropriately handle cases of violence against children in the communities.
“They are trained to report to the child protection information management system with a dashboard that receives reports of services rendered to children which is nationwide and every state is expected to feed into this dashboard with appropriate data to help in programming, which in turn will help in analysing the trend and incidence and cases that happen and also help in future intervention in programming.”
