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Nigerian Businesses Pledge $10M For Safe Schools

Nigerian Businesses Pledge $10M For Safe Schools

Nigeria’s business community on Wednesday pledged $10 million for Safe Schools, a private-sector initiative to make schools safer, particularly in the terror-stricken northeastern region, WorldBulletin reports.

“There is a desperate need to assure Nigerians that children are safe to go to school and as a result the Nigerian business community has earmarked $10 million with a pilot scheme of 500 schools,” former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Africa underway in Abuja.

The forum drew local and global business executives, politicians and entrepreneurs.

Brown, who is attending the forum as the U.N. envoy on education, said the Safe Schools initiative “wants parents and teachers to come up with what safety measures that should involve the government too.”

On the agenda at the forum are discussions that focus on innovative structural reforms, investments to generate employment and stimulating economic growth in Africa, WorldBulletin reports.

Other topics include skills creation and upgrading public services. New development initiatives are expected to be unveiled at the forum.

The Safe Schools donation came three weeks after Nigeria’s rebel group Boko Haram abducted hundreds of schoolgirls from a dormitory in Chibok, a community
in the northern state of Borno.

Brown condemned the abduction and said the British and American governments have assured him they “will provide teams to locate the abducted students in the coming days.”

Nigerian authorities said Wednesday that Britain and China had pledged to deploy satellite
imaging and tracking technology to help the country search for the schoolgirls.

The Nigerian government on Tuesday accepted an offer from U.S. President Barack Obama to deploy U.S. security personnel and assets inside Nigeria to help rescue the girls.