45 SPECIALREPORT
helpful in encouraging the youth in the community to embrace education, no matter the level.
“We were at that time interested in getting our children who used to go through the Eggon Hills to attend schools in other communities and were thus discouraged to see the benefit being educated. We are happy that some of our youth have NCE and can teach in the schools. We have eight settlements that are now directly benefiting from the primary and secondary schools though we would have wanted higher standard and other facilities to encourage them to be educated,” he said.
Another leader of the community, Pa Yamusa Vifun, said the terrain is so bad that only a helicopter can reach the hills and their children who agreed to go to school used to trek long distances to get to neighbouring communities that have primary schools.
He said the Agape Project, apart from the school and clinic also led to the drilling of boreholes that now serve the community and their neighbours.
On how efforts are being made to improve life in the community, a project facilitator in Tako, Mr Mailafiya Akah, said though the project is now rested, its benefits were tremendous. He said the community is working to establish a primary school in the Tako Clinic and establish a clinic in Tako Makaranta with the buildings at foundation level through self-help efforts.
At the Azuba Bashanyi Primary Health Centre (PHCC), the Senior Programme Manager of the project said the centre started in 2004 as a clinic.
The head of the centre, Mrs Lydia Yunana, a senior nurse, confirmed that the centre started as a clinic before it grew to become a Primary Health Care Centre (PHCC).
She said the centre has facilities including a functional laboratory, manned by Mr John Arigu, that many other centres lack.
“We have Out Patient Delivery (OPD), we administer immunization, we engage in home visit to the sick and those that cannot be transported here. Our major challenge is lack of toilet facility. The centre also needed to be fences,” Yunana said.
She said the centre work harmoniously with the Traditional Birth Attendances (TBAs) such that there was no record of complications in midwifery due to the massive and sustained enlightened and antenatal activities.
“Our enlightenment campaigns have been useful not only in the ante-natal care. The centre has drastically reduced cases of diarrhea in this community such that there were not much of needs for ORS unlike what was obtainable in the past,” she said.
A Senior Programme Office of the AAN Mrs Tasallah Chibok the organisation exited the project in 2014 and that they were happy of the level of development and management of the facilities built through the project.
According to the Country Director of ActionAid Nigeria, Ms Ojobo Ode Atuluku, who was the programme manager of the project, the partnership focused on education.
She said the arrangement was further deepened with the introduction of Partnership Against Poverty (PAP) programme which later became the Local Rights Programme (LRP) aimed at strengthening the Community Based Organisations (CBOs) and citizen’s engagement in governance through participatory approaches to capacity building and community empowerment.
She said poverty perception across the communities was common and premise on basic needs of life like money, food clothes and shelter.
According to her, before the project was rested, across the LRP communities, only Azuba Bashayi had a nursery school.
She said though things could have been better done, the objective of the partnership was not just to build for them, but to work with the communities to be independent of the projects after their commissioning.