In a bid to give succour to the marginalised in the country, ActionAid Nigeria (AAN), an NGO, has built a two blocks of classroom and toilet facilities for Gofidna community.

The project was given to the community, a suburb of the Abuja Municipal Area Council, to allow for easy access to education.

At a meeting with the community chief and villagers on Thursday, Dr Jummai Umar-Ajijola, Board Chair, AAN, said the gesture was to ensure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was achieved.

She said that AAN also deployed a reflect process in the community while ensuring capacity building for the women and youths.

According to her, recently 15 young men and women were trained on ICT for development under the AAN digitalisation project during which they acquire skills on the use of computer for communication, mobilisation and entrepreneurship.

“ActionAid has been working in Gofidna community for over 10 years now. Through the work that we have done, Gofidna community has a primary school.

“In the past, the children have to cross the road to attend school and because of that we have lost many children in this community to car accident because of the highway.

”But with what we have done with them through the recognition of their rights and advocacy to AMAC, the community started with the building of two blocks of classroom, AMAC built two blocks of classroom and AAN also built two.

”We have also done empowerment work with the women, ICT training with the youths. We want to ensure that unlike what happened to the millennium development goals, Nigeria attains at least 70 to 90 per cent of the goal.

”We will continue to work with the community based on their needs and help them to actualise it.”

Ajijola added that the organisation was using the platform to plant trees in order to make the environment befitting for all to dwell.

”This is the beginning of a programme that we are starting nationwide where in the life time of our 5 years strategic action plan we intend to plant 10,000 trees in our community. And this is directly linked to SDGs. If we do not grow our environment then everything we do is in vain,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Village Chief of the community, Chief Sumaila Tukura, lauded the AAN gesture of providing empowerment and building of classroom for residents.

Tukura noted that the community was a cluster of three village clans with same interest who had been focusing on the development of the community.

He, therefore, called for more infrastructure development in the area of healthcare facility, adding that the community had provided a place for the building of such facility.

Also, the Community Youth Leader, Tukura Al-Mustapha, commended late Abdullahi Atakpamuza, the village’s former chief, who facilitated the building of the school through contributions from villagers.

According to him, AAN and FCT came to this community in June 3, 2003 and were training us between 2003 and 2007 on advocacy plan.

“We were not taking them serious as at then because we don’t know if they are genuine. Not until 2008 and 2009, we decided to form a cooperative and engineered by late Abdullahi to gather money and build two classrooms and also hire a female teacher paying her N1,000 daily.

”Through our advocacy with the AMAC chairman, we were also given two blocks of classrooms. We cannot thank AAN enough who had helped to develop us through empowerment training, training in ICT and a whole lot of training.”

Al-Mustapha also pledged to utilise the projects while calling on the AMAC chairman to provide more developmental projects to ease the wellbeing of residents of the community.

Gofidna community is a village near Zuba along Kubwa expressway with a population of about 3500 people, children between ages of 10 and 17 years constitutes 55 per cent of the population.

Also, 90 per cent of the populations are farmers while 10 per cent are artisans who are into blacksmithing, petty trading and mechanics.

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