Adebayo Adenrele
The Adolescent Development Specialist, U-Report Nigeria, Ngozi Izuora-Songu, has said that the United Nations Children’s fund, UNICEF, remains committed towards enhancing adolescent and young people’s participation in policymaking through its U-Report mobile application platform.
She said this during a 2-day media dialogue on “Digital Learning Platforms”, organised by National Orientation Agency, NOA, Lagos State in collaboration with UNICEF over the weekend.
According to her, the platform remains a major analytical tool for UNICEF to connect to adolescents and young people all over the world to gather information that will influence decision making at all levels.
The Expert revealed that Nigeria has not fewer than 5.2 million U-Reporters noting that UNICEF has utilised the responses to inform evidence based advocacy to relevant government agencies for policymaking.
Her words: “UNICEF Nigeria in its strategy has acknowledged that we cannot run a programme for the adolescents and young people without them being on the table to also contribute to issues that affect them. Then to do this effectively, UNICEF globally has responded continuously with U-Report platform which helps us to aggregate opinions of adolescents and young people.
“It remains a major analytical tool for UNICEF and it helps us to refine our programmes and interventions.
“Globally, we have 29 million U-Reporters and U-Report as an analytical tool is existent in 95 countries where you have UNICEF. Nigeria contributes 5.2 million U-Reporters till date. U-Report in Nigeria started in 2014 and it has grown progressively.
“Under education, part of the things we have done is to run relevant polls to get young people to respond on different thematic areas. We set out a poll for young people to tell us their experience in relation to corporal punishment.
Another example is that we ran a poll asking young people to talk about the Nigeria education curriculum.
“UNICEF doesn’t just take these responses, it applies it, uses it to redesign and refine its intervention programmes but more importantly, uses it as advocacy to relevant government agencies to change policies as it concerns them.
“We have mobilised over 13,000 young people who were U-Reporters to actually come on the field to support the birth registration activities. Out of that intervention, we were able to register 3.2 million young children.”
This in itself is powerful as young people are engaged to contribute positively across their communities.
© Culled from VANGUARD