As Nigeria grapples with over 20million out-of-school children, the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) has raised the alarm that bandits are recruiting them as child soldiers.
Executive Director, CISLAC and Head of Transparency International in Nigeria, Auwal Musa (Rafsanjani) stated this in Abuja yesterday at the Nigeria Population Conversation seminar.
The event was organised by Population Matters United Kingdom in partnership with CISLAC/TI Nigeria.
Rafsanjani lamented that continued neglect of out-of-school children has made them soft targets for bandits and criminals to recruit as child soldiers.
He called on government to tackle the menace of out-of-school children, stressing that they constitute threat to the society.
He also tasked Nigerians to embrace the idea of smaller family to boycott ravaging poverty, youth unemployment, child mortality and other socio-enonomic upheavals.
“As a result, the Nigeria Population Conversation project is necessitated by the need to engender people-oriented participation and harvest perception on population to shape policy direction for well informed national planning to achieve the overall demographic advantage for sustainable development.
“More importantly, wide gap has been observed in population literacy at individual levels; and this poses further challenges to demographic accountability, as the main stakeholders in Nigeria Population Conversation,” he said.
The event also witnessed the launch of the Population Perception Survey report.
In her remarks, a member of the Advisory Board of Population Matters, Dr Edu Effiom drew a nexus between population growth and environmental sustainability.
She advocated for intensive climate-friendly agriculture, increased awareness and advocacy, more studies on the direct effect of increase population on the environment and the news to demand accountability from government.
The Guardian reports that Nigeria was ranked 158 of 185 countries in the 2019 Human Development Index.
Also, a 2022 World Bank report disclosed that about 40% of Nigerians live below the national poverty line of U$1.90 per day and about 95.2 million are in poverty.
