Girl child education critical in tackling global warming – Amarnani

Umesh Amarnani, managing director at Pacegate Limited, and founder of Evolve, a not-for-profit initiative geared towards helping Nigerian girl child access quality education has accentuated the need to educate the girl child in tackling global warming.

Amarnani in a chat with BusinessDay explained how educating the girl-child will help the women folks realise higher wages and greater upward mobility, which he said contributes to the national economic growth of a country.

“Yes, there is a link between educating girls and climate change. To properly explain the concepts first, let’s look at climate change.

According to the United Nations, climate change is a real problem which is being felt with water availability, making it scarcer in more regions.

Global warming exacerbates water shortages in already water-stressed regions and is leading to an increased risk of agricultural droughts affecting crops, and ecological droughts increasing the vulnerability of ecosystems.

“Educated girls realise higher wages and greater upward mobility, contributing to economic growth. Their rates of maternal mortality drop and they are less likely to marry as children and against their will.

Therefore, fewer children would result in lesser emissions of harmful gases that damage the climate. It also means that the limited resources will be enough for a declining population,” he said.

The King’s College, London management expert further said; “Securing women’s right to voluntary, high-quality family planning around the world would have powerful positive impacts on the health, welfare, and life expectancy of both women and their children. It also can affect greenhouse gas emissions.”

UNESCO report in 2022 revealed that about 10 million Nigerian children are out -of- school, and of that number 60 percent are girls. These girls become victims of early marriage, unwanted pregnancy and rape among others simply because they are not educated enough to take care of themselves.

Some of these girls drop out of school because nobody cares for their school uniforms, books and other school needs. Getting a little help in that regard goes a long way in putting smiles on their faces and needed confidence to face their studies.

Amarnani said to tackle girl child education, Evolve has a pan-Nigerian approach where it works with the ministry of education and the educational district of each state for approval, planning, and implementation.

“We have been funded largely through self-contributions from ADIPRO, Pacegate Limited and PEARL (Pacegate Energy and Resources Limited); supported by our lead partner, Polaris Bank as well as our supporting partners like OVH Energy Marketing now NNPC Retail, BIC pens, Crownstar books, and Hill + Knowlton Strategies.

Over the last 3 years, we have been able to support over 10,000 secondary school girls in 32 schools across nine states in Nigeria. And about 10,000 girl children have benefited from these school supplies over a period of three years. We are soliciting the support of more organisations to help drive this vision to support 50,000 girl children in five years,” he said.

On how Evolve selects its beneficiary schools, he said that organisation used the stakeholders’ interests and the host communities as the criteria for picking the public schools.

He explained that the investment per school is an average of two million five hundred thousand naira. And that the ministry of education has been very supportive of approvals in executing this project.

Moreover, he revealed that Evolve has launched inspire programme to impact teachers on 21st-century value-based education.

“Inspire is a value-based education enrichment programme assisting educators to develop a heart-centred approach to teaching. This will enable trainers to take a holistic approach towards student growth using 21st-century styles of learning such as the heartfulness way,” he said.

Furthermore, he said; “The aim of this programme is to create a loving and compassionate learning environment through the heart-based approach. The ongoing training facilitated by international professionals across the world, covers facilitation skills, inspired learning, heterogenous learners, heart-centred education, curriculum practical workshops and communication skills.

The Inspire programme being implemented in Nigeria was launched in 2021 with the training of 18 teachers from six schools within Ilupeju in Lagos State, Nigeria. We plan to continue in subsequent years so that more teachers can benefit in impacting the lives of more children.