The World Bank Board of Directors said it has approved a $500m credit from the International Development Association for the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE).

The bank disclosed this in a statement titled  ‘Nigeria to boost support for keeping adolescent girls in school’, released on Wednesday, July 29.

It said that the initiative is to improve secondary education opportunities among girls in targeted areas, stating that adolescent girls face many constraints in accessing and completing secondary education.

The statement read “In northern Nigeria, the lack of secondary schools was significantly greater with up to 10 primary schools for every secondary school.

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“Poor condition of infrastructure and a lack of water sanitation and hygiene facilities makes it difficult for girls to stay in school.

“In addition, close to 80 per cent of poor households are in the North, which makes it very challenging for them to cover the direct and indirect costs of schooling.

“All these factors have contributed towards limiting the number of girls that have access to secondary school.

“If nothing is done, 1.3 million girls out of the 1.85 million who began primary school in 2017/2018 in the northern states will drop out before reaching the last year of junior secondary school.”

The world bank emphasized that the AGILE programme will use the secondary school as a platform to empower girls through education, life skills, health education: including, nutrition and reproductive health, GBV awareness and prevention, negotiations skills, self-agency and digital literacy skills. 

A minimum of 6 million girls and boys are expected to benefit from the project and many more cohorts of students will continue benefiting after the project ends, it added.

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“There is no better investment to accelerate Nigeria’s human capital development than to significantly boost  girls’ education,” says Shubham Chaudhuri, World Bank Country Director for Nigeria   

The World Bank said the project would support access to secondary education and empowerment for adolescent girls in seven states which are Kano, Kebbi, Kaduna, Katsina, Borno, Plateau and Ekiti.

It said added that the project would benefit about 6.7 million adolescents and 15.5 million direct project beneficiaries would include families and communities in participating States

“The AGILE project will expand existing primary and Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) to include both JSSs and Senior Secondary Schools to make schools functional, safe, and inclusive to teaching and learning,” World Bank added.