NGO says future of children depends on better coordination, working systems
FOUNDER and Executive Director, Green Pastures Kiddies Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) Tolulope Shodunke has said that the future of our children depends on stronger partnerships, better coordination and systems that work together.
Shodunke disclosed this in Lagos on Thursday at the NGO 20th anniversary Summit.
Newsmen reports that the Child Impact Summit has the theme “Closing the Gaps: Strengthening Systems for Better Outcomes”.
The Executive Director said that children rarely fall behind because people don’t care.
She said they fall behind because the systems around them don’t connect noting that after 20 years, she no longer saw isolated problems but saw disconnected systems.
“And when systems don’t connect, children pay the price. I’ll give you two examples, So like many Nigerian parents, my dad wanted me to study law and he loved me so much.
“He wanted the very best for me, he believed he was preparing me for a secure future, i finished secondary school at 16 and he really wanted me to study law.
“And that meant I had to hit a specific cutoff mark for Joint Admission Examination Board (JAMB). So I wrote my first JAMB, the second and another, and another, and another.
“So I wrote JAMB seven times, Yeah, so my father was doing what many loving parents do, he was working with the understanding he had. He wanted his daughter to be a lawyer.He called me baby lawyer.
“But somewhere between those seven examinations, my own voice became quieter,
the dream slowly stopped being mine, It became his” she said.
She said this revealed something much bigger, a system that often presents success as one narrow path, instead of recognising that children have different gifts, different interests, and different futures.
Shodunke said that was a gap, not a gap in love, but a gap in the system.
“And another story. So during the course of Green Pasture’s kiddies’ work, we met children who had fully recovered in hospitals, their doctors had discharged them, they were medically fit to go home, but they couldn’t leave.
“Not because they were still sick, but because their families couldn’t afford to pay the hospital bills.
” So think about that. a child, healthy enough to leave, but unable to go home, every extra day in that hospital bed became another day away from school, another day away from normal childhood, and another day life stood still for them.
“Again, that problem wasn’t that people didn’t care, doctors cared, parents cared, the hospital cared but the system around that child still failed to connect and that child pay the price” she said.
She said extraordinary work done in isolation could only take us so far, the future of our children depends on stronger partnerships, better coordination and systems that work together, instead of alongside one another.
She said that was what closing the gap, strengthening systems for better outcomes means.
“So my hope for today is simple, that we listen, that we learn, and that we leave with at least one new partnership, one new commitment, one practical step forward, because that is how systems begin to change” she said.
