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Children’s Rights Training Project (CRTP)
As with most of the global community, Nigeria took a step in the right direction when the Federal Government passed into law the landmark Child’s Rights Act (CRA) in 2003. For the first time, all the rights of children in Nigeria (reflecting the entitlements in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, have been codified in a single enactment. In essence, the CRA seeks to bring about a harmonized legal regime, which reflects universal human rights standards as opposed to the “patchwork” of inadequate State-centred approaches, which have characterized the legal position in the 36 constituent States in the Nigeria Federation.
As the CRA is a relatively new law, there is still a low awareness of its innovations among children and their parents/legal guardians and their advocates or representatives. The process of familiarization is also being hampered by an emergent North-South divide along religious lines. Against, this background, DIN’s position is that while it is important to achieve nationwide implementation of the CRA, this will take time due to the slow nature of legislative processes. However, one of the ways in which the CRA’s innovative provisions can trickle down to secure the position of children in Nigeria is to use educators and teachers who are key actors in the world of children as change agents. We have noted also that neither the teacher-training curriculum nor the formal school curriculum extends to children’s dignity and human rights education. Consequently, within this important group, there is a dearth of knowledge of human rights principles and frameworks and how they pertain to children. Bringing about changes to these curricula is equally a slow process. But not to take any action at all will mean that children in Nigeria will continue to be susceptible to neglect, abuse, violent acts and exploitation. CRTP, which will commence in the third quarter of 2006 plots a different course from current approaches to bringing about the implementation of the CRA by
- targeting educators and teachers;
- emphasizing active learning; and
- informal strategies and actions with a high replication potential.
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