Power Forward: PanAfricare, ExxonMobil engages FCT stakeholders on 2023 project
PanAfricare, Exxonmobil and NBA Africa, has engaged stakeholders, in the Federal Capital Territory(FCT) on the 2023 Power Forward projects as they kicked off tenth season youth development program in Nigeria.
The engagement meeting was organised to enlighten secondary school principals, proprietors, secondary education board and other stakeholders on the outlined projects and activities planned for the students on the power forward project year and also to get feedbacks on how the program has impacted the students.
The Power Forward is a Project that uses basketball to teach health literacy, including malaria prevention, personal hygiene, life skills such as leadership, respect, and responsibility to secondary school students in Abuja, since the program’s launch in 10 secondary schools in 2013,
It has now expanded to 40 secondary schools across FCT. Power Forward has cumulatively reached more than 200,000 people in communities in Abuja through life skills and public health awareness seminars, as well as malaria prevention and basketball programming.
The Country Director of Pan-Africare, Dr Patrick Adah, while explaining the reason for the meeting with the stakeholders majorly the principals and proprietors of the secondary school, pointed out that the essence of the engagement is to let them know about the program that they have planned for the year, the activities of the power forward project which is being implemented in thier schools.
“As you all know, the students are involved the schools where we are implementing some of them are private schools and some of them are public schools, so we gathered here the people from the secondary education board here we have the chairman of the secondary education board present, you have other directors of the secondary education.”
According to him, this is to intimate them about the project, let them know what we have done over the years particularly the last year, and then let also tell them what we want to do share with them our planned activities for the year so that when we come into thier school they will easily know that this is something that we have already discussed.”
“It’s no longer strange to them because they will bring thier students out to participate in the project and it’s also to ensure that there is synergy of activities both in the school because the school have a calendar that they run with.”
“Like I said every year we gather together with the stakeholders to let them know and also ensure that they give us feedback on what they feel about our project and also suggest areas of improvement.”
The Nigeria Basketball Association NBA Africa Vice President and Country Head of NBA Nigeria, Gbemisola Abudu, also reiterated that the program will not only teach students about basketball but will also educate them on life skills and also teach them to protect themselves from malaria and other health issues.
She said: “The whole idea of the program is utilizing the power of basket ball to educate the youth on life skills and to teach them of Thier health issues particularly the area of malaria prevention”.
“So this is we are going into our 10th year now and in 9 years the program has been able to reach 200 thousand or more than 200 thousand youths in Abuja and has been able to instill life skills that stays with them for the rest of Thier lifes it’s been able to introduce them to fundamental skills of basketball and our goal is to be able to expand the reach of this, we are currently doing this in Abuja the goal will be for us to be able to take this program to other geopolitical zones in Nigeria”.
Also speaking, one of the principals, Fatima Muhammad who is the principal of Government Girls Secondary School Dutse, disclosed that the program has really impacted her students, and it only just started last year in her school.
“We are the newly adopted ones being a single gender school and since the program has started the girls choosen happen to be amazingly doing well, intellectually, physically infact mentally the girls are becoming more balanced.”
“My wish is if power forward can actually incorporate all the girls, that would have even been more amazing because everyone wants to be a partner to that and coach Sharon is doing great with the girls. Just last year, we have 30 of them divided into two groups”. She said.
