By Maria Famakinwa

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The Wife of Ondo State Governor, Arabinrin Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu, has said that the At-Risk-Children Project, ARC-P, would further reduce the poverty burden of the state.

She said  this affirmation during a familiarisation meeting with Local Government Coordinators of ARC-P, held at Rotunda Government house ground, Alagbaka Akure, the State capital.

She commended the doggedness of  the Special Adviser to the Governor on Gender and Secretary of the ARC-P Advisory Committee, Mrs. Olamide Falana in ensuring that the state benefitted from the programme.

Addressing the ARC-P Coordinators, the Ondo First Lady, who doubles as the Chairperson of the project Advisory Committee said: “Your position is very strategic and we really want to move fast, and I thought that when we have 50 facilitators from local government, we’ll need a coordinator; we need somebody like a middle man between the local and the State government and that was how this idea of having coordinators came in.

According to her, the selection was premised on the expectation that they’re in the better position to know their localities in order to make the project implementation processes seamless and achieve its purpose.

Earlier in her address, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Gender, and Secretary of the ARC-P Advisory Committee in Ondo State, Mrs. Olamide Falana, congratulated the beneficiaries and applauded the effort of the First Lady in ensuring that unemployed graduates were injected into the programme as coordinators in a bid to empower them.

She emphasised that they were all expected to be resident in the LGA they represented, noting that vulnerable children were from a local community, and households.

She informed that they would work closely with 50 facilitators from the local government level who would soon be shortlisted from the ARC-P Portal, adding that they must ensure all nooks and crannies of each community is covered.

Falana highlighted the key pillars of the project to include, basic literacy and numeracy skills, health and nutrition, entrepreneurial and financial literacy skills, creativity and digital skills, cultural environment and climate change, security sports and insensitisation.

She further informed that the Project implementation would take the form of  need assessment data of every local area, before choosing any skill acquisition for beneficiaries in a given community.