The wife of governor  of
Cross River State,  Mrs Obioma Liyel-Imoke, says she is committed to ending child abandonment and making the state conducive for child upbringing.
Mrs Liyel-Imoke, the Founder and Chairperson of Partnership Opportunities for Women Empowerment Realisation (POWER), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), said this in Calabar, recently.
She told newsmen that POWER had been addressing the root causes of abandonment of children on streets in the state.
Liyel-Imoke said child abandonment in the state was due to the inability of teenagers, forced motherhood through unwanted pregnancies, to cope with the challenges of motherhood.
“We discovered that a major cause of the problem is that of teenage girls who mistakenly get pregnant and abandon their babies because they are ill-prepared,” she said.
Mrs Liyel-Imoke said this was also why, in response to the situation, the NGO initiated a programme called Mothers Against Child Abandonment (MACA).
She said, under the programme, two homes were established for the abandoned babies and the teenage mothers.
“At the Refuge Girls, young girls who are pregnant are taught various skills to enable them live independently forever when they leave the home,’’ Liyel-Imoke said.
She said the affected girls were, during the period of counseling, given the option of taking their babies home at the end of the training.
“They were also given a second option of leaving them for the state government to care for, if they cannot take care of them,’’ the governor’s wife said.
She explained that the second option was to avoid a situation where the babies could become a sad reminder in their lives.
“This can result in the possible thought of getting rid of them,’’ Liyel-Imoke said.
She, however, said the programme had been able to save quite a number of girls and some of them have gone back to school.
The governor’s wife also said the NGO had thought it would be good for the girls to have someone as a role model.
“So, we initiated the Calabar Carnival Queen (CCQ), which is not a beauty pageant per se.
“Given what young people like and their psychology, we considered that pageantry was the best platform to capture their minds and it has worked like magic,” she said.
Liyel-Imoke also said POWER’s vision was to have a society where all women were able to meet their basic needs.
She said the NGO aimed at being a leading one in Africa, working for the eradication of extreme poverty among women, through evidence-driven initiatives, enterprise development, and capacity-building.