No fewer than 260 journalists have been trained in the Humanity Capital Development Programme (HCD) in the South-South region.
BusinessDay reports that the HCD Programme is a project of the National Economic Council (NEC) with its Core Working Groups on three thematic areas of health and nutrition, education and labour force participation.
OluSoji Adeniyi, the South-South Regional Consultant of HCD made the disclosure at a two-day Media engagement and HCD reporting for media agencies held in Benin City.
Adeniyi who spoke on the topic, ” Accelerating HCD base in Nigeria”, noted that the three thematic areas of HCD which are health and nutrition, education and labour force participation were poorly reported.
The Regional Consultant charged journalists to adequately report the three thematic areas to enable beneficiaries understand the benefits that are inherent in the programme.
He opined that stakeholders and communities were not aware of the benefits of the programme.
He noted that the media needed to say more about what government was doing through the HCD to enable communities become aware of the benefit of education and other thematic areas of the programme.
” The training is to build the capacity of media agencies and also to introduce the components of HCD to journalists to avoid misconception.
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“The essence of the workshop is to let you know that HCD is a life cycle of a child effect which begins from the womb, the health of the mother, breastfeeding, nurturing of the child and the educational status of that child.
” It involves the opportunity for the child to become employable through the skills that they would have gotten.
“During the period they were exposed to adolescence to young adults who would contribute to the labour force of the country.
“So the media need to engage the communities to let them know that a child that is wondering around during school hours, is a child that is likely to drop out of school and need to be corrected and taken back to school.
“We want people to understand that a child that is going to be fully developed to contribute to the economy of the nation start from when the child is in the mother’s womb.
” Till the child is given birth to in a facility that has the right kind of birth attendant so that we do not loose the child and mother to infant and maternal mortality,” he said.
In her remarks, Violet Obiokoro, the Edo HCD Focal Person and Managing Director, Edo Skills Development Agency, (Edojobs), noted that governor Godwin Obaseki had invested in HCD and was working with the three thematic areas of health and nutrition, education and labour force
Obiokoro, however, lamented that all of the improvement recorded so far by the governor in the state in the thematic areas have been under reported.
“The governor was done a lot in these areas but they are under reported and as a result, people are not aware of what government is doing,”she added.
According to her, I want to appeal to you all to begin to look into these areas and help us report what government is doing.
“It is high time we begin to report these activities and collect data by ourselves instead of waiting for people to report and collect data for us”, she stated.
