The United Nations Children’s Fund says it will prioritise community engagement to achieve sustainable outcomes and decision-making processes in Jigawa.

The UN agency said it would undertake strategic repositioning towards encouraging community engagement in view of the existing local government autonomy.

Rahman Farrah, chief of UNICEF, Kano field office, said this on the sidelines of the 2024 year review meeting in Dutse on Tuesday.

“We have made tremendous progress in all the sectors, for example, education. We reduced the high number of out-of-school children. We made progress in the open defecation campaign in local government areas.

“We also made progress in nutrition, health, child protection, birth registration and poverty reduction through cash transfer under the social policy programmes,” he said.

He said the review meeting achieved three things: taking stock of the achievements in the previous year and taking care of all the environmental changes.

This, he said, assisted in identifying priorities and bottlenecks impeding the rights of children.

According to him, UNICEF will focus on the ODF campaign in communities and reduce the number of out-of-school children and the immunisation and maternal mortality rate.

“We also want to focus on upscaling groups birth registration as part of the child protection programme. In social policy, there is a big divide in terms of poor children, who are at risk of missing out on opportunities.

“UNICEF will focus on those children at the risk of missing out on health and education because of poverty, through conditional cash transfer, we will reach out to every child,” he said.

(NAN)