The Destiny Trust: Meet This NGO That Is Helping To Keep Homeless Kids In School And Off The Streets
According to the Nigerian Ministry of Education, the number of out-of-school children stands at 10.1 million, an increase of more than 3 million from last year. What this means is that Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Issues like gender discrimination, armed conflict, poverty, child labour and child marriage have contributed to depriving many Nigerian children of the right to quality education, a right which is mandated by the Child Rights Act 2003. Nearly half of the children aged between 7 and 14 years old in the north-eastern and north-western regions are out of school.
The attitude of the government has not been helpful either. In 2020, only 6.7 per cent of the national budget was allocated to education, which is far below the 15 per cent recommended by UNESCO. Add that to the fact that Nigeria accounts for about one-fifth of all out-of-school children across the globe (according to a UNICEF finding), and you would find that the country has an educational crisis on its hands.
However, the efforts of a few non-profit organisations over the past few years provide hope that all is not lost. The Destiny Trust, launched in 2012, and co-founded by Abimbola Ojenike, Ikem Isiekwena and Kemi Oluboba, commits itself to provide education, shelter and feeding for homeless children, as well as other young people in disadvantaged circumstances. Over the years, the Destiny Trust has rolled out a number of initiatives aimed at keeping youths off the streets and helping them make up for the years spent outside the classroom. The Kids Innovation Hub empowers street children by teaching them coding and computer programming, the Afterschool Assistance initiative involves the setting up of after-school centres across slums and poor communities in Lagos, and the Education Bridge Initiative assists out-of-school children to develop learning interest and receive foundational education before being enrolled into schools. There is also the School Enrolment and Back-to-School initiative, which targets children in informal settlements that are prone to demolition, and provides these children with the materials they need to reintegrate into school and cushion the effects of displacement.
Neusroom spoke with one of The Destiny Trust’s co-founders, Abimbola Ojenike, who opens up on the circumstances that led him and others to start the organisation.
“While I was an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan, I had an encounter that sparked my interest in helping children. I was taking a walk off campus to use a cybercafe when I saw a little girl fighting with her mother for not letting her go to school. Her mother was blind and she was the one leading her around to beg for alms. She had flung the walking stick and was telling the small crowd that had gathered how the mother kept promising her that she would go to school after raising some money, but still failed to enrol her after they made money. She protested that afternoon after seeing school children returning from school while she roamed the streets with her mother.”
“It was sad seeing the situation around the girl, and how difficult it would be to keep her in school without any guarantee for the welfare of her mother and herself. I walked away from the scene helplessly, but told myself that in the future, I would establish purpose-built facilities where children in such circumstances would go to school while their vulnerable parents are cared for. Each time I saw children on the streets of Akin Adesola, Adeola Odeku and Adeyemo Alakija in Victoria Island, I was reminded of the dream to do something about education for poor children on the street, but I could only look away in pity and helplessness after giving handouts.”
He adds: “The story changed sometime in 2012. One afternoon, I was coming back from court, and one of the children on the street where my law office was located insulted me because I didn’t give her money. I had known the little girl for over two years on the street and she was always grateful for whatever we gave her and whenever we did. The ‘calm little girl’ was changing; she had so much hate and anger against everyone. I got back to the office and shared the experience with another colleague. He had observed the same, and noted the increasing number of children who roam the streets during school hours around Victoria Island. We resolved it was time to do something about it, and invited three other colleagues to join the effort.”
“We discovered that most of the children used to retire to Kuramo Beach or Bar Beach at night. We were shocked to see the number of children sleeping on the beachfront without parents or guardians. Kuramo was a fun place for them, but it was also a hideout for drug dealers. We started with soup kitchens at Kuramo Beach and Bar Beach, just so we could get to know the children better and how to help. We also thought that a different kind of social intervention was needed to secure the education of children who had been displaced, or who endured abuse on the home front. This is why our work at The Destiny Trust focuses on the holistic needs of the children – education, care, protection, guidance and empowerment.”
Ojenike also explains that in the early stages, he and his team struggled with funding, as well as some push-back from the very people they were trying to help.
“We started with so many assumptions. We thought that a poor person would readily embrace the opportunity to have a better life, and that nobody would want to be homeless and poor. We learned the hard way that people’s choices shape what they become, and how wrong choices hold them back from making the best of new opportunities offered to them.
Funding was our biggest challenge. We depended on our small social network. We set up our first children’s home in Lagos with household items donated by colleagues, family and friends, and paid the rent for the facility with support from our respective employers. When another rent was due, we took personal bank loans and borrowed endlessly to feed the children, send them to school and pay the salary of our full-time staff. It helped that we all had day jobs, and still do.”
How did the team cope with so many children around, especially considering the fact that they were each from different backgrounds?
“Having many children from different backgrounds around is not something we cope with. It is what we enjoy. We love the diversity of The Destiny Trust family. It’s beautiful to see children from across the country living together as one. Children teach us every day that our tribal differences are insignificant: you shouldn’t discriminate against people simply because of where they are coming from. Our children do not really understand ethnic slurs and we have bonds of friendship that cut across tribes. Most of the children also had common socio-economic experiences where they are coming from. Everyone saw life on the streets and in the slums. Once children get into a new environment, they begin to adapt to newly accepted patterns. Some of them have evolved into culture carriers and quite easily influence the behaviour of the new children we bring in.”
In August 2020, The Destiny Trust rescued a girl, simply identified as “Child B”, from an abductor whom she had called “Mummy”, but had caged her for five months with no food or sunlight. That same month, the team rescued “Child X”, a three-year-old homeless girl who had been sexually assaulted on multiple occasions by her father at the Katwa slum in Lagos.
On the issue of rescuing children from abusive families, Ojenike explains that it’s usually heartbreaking for the team, but a necessary action.
“It’s always sad to have to rescue children from their own parents. It is usually a difficult task because most abusive parents feel that whatever they did to their children is a ‘family affair’, that they own their children and nobody from the outside has any right to rescue a child from them. It is tough to explain to parents that their parental rights must bow to child protection laws and the rights of the child. Such interventions often require collaboration with the police, child protection agencies and the Family Courts.”
In April 2021, the organisation launched a centre called “Esther’s Harbour” at Igboora in Ibarapa Central Local Government of Oyo State. Named after the late mother of one of the co-founders, Esther’s Harbour serves as an afterschool support centre for children.
On the question of future endeavours and possible expansion, Ojenike says, “our dream is to be everywhere children need us in Nigeria, and to replicate models that work in the context of each environment. We consider an expansion, but we are approaching it cautiously. For example, Ibadan has been on our minds since the end of 2018 but the centre is just opening now. We care so much about the qualitative impact of our work and sustainability. We are not driven by numbers or the pressure to show a national spread. We are all about that one child who could become a problem to society. We also consider that setting up a residential learning centre like what we have in Lagos is not one solution that fits all. In some other states, we are simply partnering with existing in-centre care programmes that align with our objectives and child protection policy. Children in Benue, Ogun and Kaduna States are being sponsored to school and we have no physical centre in those places yet. In the future, we will collaborate more on school enrolment and set up accelerated educational centres in various parts of the country.”
“We will seek to document evidence from our work in a more formal way and seek to provide this as input in policy development, especially for issues on the intersection of education and homelessness. This is far more important to us because we know we cannot fix Nigeria’s educational problems with philanthropy alone. We cannot enrol 13.2million children in school. We cannot cater to all homeless children. We can’t renovate all schools, or train all teachers. The scale is bigger and the dimensions of the problem are much more diverse than what charity can grapple with. That is why we think that one of the best contributions we can make is to share evidence of what we know works, and how it works.”
The Destiny Trust is one of several other organisations making attempts to fill in the gap with respect to providing access to learning. Where the government has been neglectful and circumstances like poverty and insecurity have stood in the way of children’s rights to education, these establishments have done their best to mitigate the disaster that is Nigeria’s educational crisis.
Slum2School is a non-governmental organisation whose work is focused on advocacy, community interventions, policy formulation, and youth engagement. Launched in 2012, it is a volunteer-driven organisation that works in slums and under-served communities to build new learning centres and collaborate with public schools to improve the quality of education. It also places children from low-income homes on scholarships in the schools that it partners with. Slum2School has a STEM and Innovation Lab designed to help children build mobile applications, and an Early Childhood Development Centre (ECDC) designed to serve about 600 children weekly. In 2019, the organisation enrolled 510 out-of-school children from 11 communities into 5 schools across Lagos State. In October 2020, Habeebat Olatunde and Adbulmalik Oseni, two of the organisation’s beneficiaries who were discovered years ago at Makoko, were invited to speak at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) World Children’s Day event.
The Purple Girl Foundation, with its headquarters at Ilupeju in Lagos, focuses on providing educational support for female children from underprivileged backgrounds. Launched in 2018 by Mary Akpobome, a former bank executive, the group provides yearly tuition, technical support, capacity building and mentoring to improve the academic performance of young girls. It partners with private institutions to facilitate sessions on character development, and commits itself to provide health insurance for its beneficiaries.
LEAP Africa, established in 2002, is primarily focused on youth engagement, leadership training, education and entrepreneurship. With footprints in 26 states and a presence in countries like Ghana and Rwanda, it constantly facilitates workshops and programmes aimed at equipping youths with a wide range of skills. Since its inception, it has impacted over 500,000 students with its community change projects, and over 24,000 students have benefited from its public secondary school programmes. LEAP Africa also partners with a number of organisations, including Lafarge, Sahara Foundation, Sterling Bank and JP Morgan.
Chinyere Chukwudi-Okeh, an author and literary critic, tells Neusroom that The Destiny Trust has made an invaluable contribution to child development.
“They are quite committed to taking many kids off the street. Abimbola (one of the co-founders) is as selfless as they come. TDT has teamed up with a lot of helping hands across the country, and facilitated monthly donations to cater for the feeding, clothing, school fees and housing of some of these kids taken off the streets. They aid these kids with literary, technical and digital skills to compete favourably with other schoolchildren who have better fortunes.”
Nigeria still has a long way to go in bridging the existing educational gap, but the work of these organisations cannot be ignored. It is almost impossible to take every child off the streets, but at the very least, hundreds and thousands of children are being provided with a new lease of life. The efforts of these NGOs should be commended, and they could use all the collaboration and support they can get.
