After years of attacks and destruction of lives and properties in the northeast by Boko Haram, the region is slowly coming back to live. However, it is faced by serious humanitarian and developmental needs.

A Non-governmental organization, Adopt-A-Camp, is assisting Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the region by providing educational facilities coupled with vocational training. The NGO has several educational project for the IDPs. It recently unveiled the prototype of their collapsible solar-powered schools.

In this interview with YNaija’s #Impact365 series, Bukky Shonibare, a front-line member of the #BBOG and the coordinator of the Adopt-A-Camp initiative tells us more about their works in the northeast.

Could you please explain more about your program in the northeast?

Our work, in view, covers mainly internally displaced persons (IDP) and young people -particularly school age children in the host community. In the northeast we cover five of the six northeastern states. But most of our projects are domiciled in Borno and Adamawa states. So, basically, what we do is to focus on education for Internally Displaced Persons. So in doing so, we have two different programs: the first program is Adopt a Camp that reaches Internally Displaced Persons. The second Program is Girl Child Africa that reaches young girls in communities where there are no schools.

For both of them we have two projects that we are currently executing. First is the school in a bag project. School in a bag is where we have school bags loaded with school materials that we give to children in the camp and in those host communities. The second program is the learning hub. So the learning hub is all about building tarpaulin schools. We set up tarpaulin schools in Internally Displaced Persons camp so that the children there can learn and we provide them with school in a bag so they can have school material.

However, we have just designed something new which is the collapsible solar powered school where we used board and tarpaulins to build collapsible platforms. But it is solar powered and the kids have three times during the day that they can attend school because some of their parents will want them to come and sell so we negotiate with them to send their children to school in the morning, afternoon or in the evening.

The kids can attend classes three times in a day because some of the parents ask their children to go and hawk simply because they don’t have means of living. So some come nine to twelve, others come one to four and then others come from four to six thirty.

So when it gets to the evening that’s when we use the solar powered lamps. And it’s all collapsible so that in case those IDPs are asked to go back to their communities we can collapse them and carry them to their own community or any community that needs it.

Ma, how about the teachers? Do you also provide the teachers?

The teachers come from the host community because some teachers have been displaced. Some teachers teach in different schools -there are some private and public schools around – and can spare their time to come and teach the children in the IDP camp. There are some teachers that are displaced and are in the IDP camp, so what we give them is what we call the teaching aid -it’s a pack that contains the curriculum, workbook and other learning materials that they need to teach the children.

How do you motivate these children? I gather that most of them won’t want to come to school. Is there like free lunch or something?

So we’ve never had free lunch. What we do is to donate food items, which was why we launched the food program. We launched the food program because a lot of the parents use food as an excuse for not sending their children to school. So with the food project we donate food items -food and non-food items- to the IDP camp so when the parents know that we’re the ones that donated the food and we do the education program, they easily accept. So that’s a motivating factor.

However, one of the camps that we are going to, in the next three months we’re introducing lunch in our learning hub projects because a lot of the children don’t have means of living, they rely on family and all of that. So we want to see how we can provide meals when they are attending school.

The challenge for us is that the moment we start providing food there will be much children that will come but we want to make sure that we have the capacity to accommodate those children so that it is sustainable. That is why we are pushing it till the January, 2017 session by then we would have expanded capacity.

In terms of motivation as well, for the volunteer teachers, we don’t pay them salary but we give them stipend. And then the stipend is about N15, 000 -that’s the UNICEF standard for volunteers. We also try to celebrate them and all of that.

Some of these children cannot rely on education for the rest of their lives and knowing the way the economy is going. Do you also train them in skill acquisition?

Good question. So what we have done is that we are developing a curriculum and work way for the learning hub project such that  -we want to teach them for in three ways – we teach them numeracy, literacy and then we teach them life skills, we don’t teach this for the early three years, we do so for the late three years. For the later three years we begin to teach them things like photography, agriculture -not just the theoretical but the practical part. At one of the camps where they gave us a small expanse of land where we can use to teach agriculture so we plant maize, beans and begin to do practical. So it is all in the curriculum that we’re currently developing.

For the first early three years we make them learn by training. So we give things like educational facilities, like you know these trains and all of that. So people donate it to us and what they donate to us we give the children. Because their mental capacity cannot accommodate learning big vocational skills like that. We’re talking about children between five to seven years but by the time they get to nine, ten, eleven, twelve, we begin to teach them vocational skills.

Like you know, those communities are very poor communities. There are limited opportunities for formal jobs. There are limited opportunities to go and work as, maybe, a secretary or manager or something. They don’t have such economic capability. What they have is lands to do farming. What they have is space to do photography. They can learn tailoring. There is a camp where people from Gwoza in Nasarawa, we are sending some of their girls to school, so two of the mothers want to do tailoring so they are empowering them with sewing machine.

We are also trying to catch these children young so that they are not relying on all these clichés that we have given them that formal education is the only way to success. Formal education is not the only way to success. Because of their environmental reality where vocational skills thrive more than formal skills, we are building them in that capacity of vocational skills. So it is a blend of both, but we are growing more of the vocational than the formal. Formal is just literacy and numeracy -so that they can speak English and do basic calculations.

Once these children leave the camp, what else? Will you continue to provide them with education?

So this is where advocacy comes in. One, we can’t do everything and we know our limit.

And the advocacy is around the fact that when the children leave the camp and go back to their home community, one of the things that we want to ensure that we do is to make sure that the learning hub we have in their camps is taken to their community. Because what we find in a lot of the camp is that we have a larger concentration of a group of people from the same community. Like the camp we are working with in Biu, there are more people from Gworza in that particular camp. So they can take it to their communities and continue to learn. However, the challenge is that we can only do little because of the limited resources that we have available to us.

So when they leave the camp we still continue to make sure that they get educated through learning hub that is why we have extended learning hub to go beyond just IDP but to other communities also because there are communities where there are no schools at all. Some communities have schools but the children have to walk long distance because the schools are not within close proximity.

So we are taking learning hub so that children don’t have to walk long distance before they can get to school and in those communities as well, they can continue to learn.

But a lot now has to do with advocacy where we tell the government that this is the extent which we have done but we want you to take it further because we are focusing on just the elementary classes we are not doing secondary school. What happens to them after the elementary? Adopt a Camp doesn’t have that capacity yet.

We are also working with other NGOs who have the capacity to take on more but we have few. People don’t want to go to the northeast because of the security situation. So a lot still have to go back to the government which is why we still have to do a lot of advocacy around the prompt intervention for the humanitarian crisis that is going on.

We focus on education, we do a bit of food but there is health challenge, there is economic empowerment. There is so much but if we can do a multi-agency collaboration, that way I am doing education, somebody else can be doing health, and another person can be economic empowerment. And then the fusion of all of that can provide an holistic and sustainable support for the IDPs.

Let me also say that one critical challenge that we have is that we bring the education but these IDPs also have several other needs and because we are not meeting those other needs it makes our educational intervention unsustainable. This is why we keep calling on government to have that multi-sectorial intervention to the humanitarian crisis.