5th January, 2024
School on the street, a tuition free school to support out of school and disadvantaged children with quality education and a temporary emergency shelter is located in Abudu town, Iyana Ilogbo, Ogun state.
The vision behind this life-changing project was borne from personal struggles. Israel Olagadeyo, the visionary who is also a missionary, having faced financial constraints during his schooling years, was driven by the desire to provide quality education and a safe haven for those unable to afford it.
Oluwatobi Raji, the co-founder, having faced harrowing experiences of sexual abuse and homelessness, is determined to turn her painful past into a force for positive change. Her aim is to offer these vulnerable children not just education but also a safe space away from domestic violence and abuse.
Both of them spoke to P.M. News’ Victoria Olayemi about the vision, mission, activities and challenges of the school
Olagadeyo shares the vision behind this educational change project in the Iyana Ilogbo community.
What prompted this vision?
I grew up having difficulties in school. As a result, my parents could not afford to sponsor my schooling, my father being a pastor and my mother being an elementary teacher. So little were the things they could have.
I was able to have some support from family and friends. This was how I grew up till I finished secondary school and went to university. Getting to the University, I went through the thick and the thin before I graduated. After I left the university and while waiting for the NYSC, there was the coronavirus pandemic when a lot of schools were shut down. I had to set up a school because a lot of people could no longer make ends meet not to talk of paying school fees. This became a pain because at that time I knew that there were a lot of solutions that could come onboard for the children’s educational system. Iyana Ilogbo being an area that I had been conversant with and grown up in, I was able to know that there were a lot of people who could not afford even the low-income schools that were there.
I looked at what I could do. Then I met my partner; Miss Oluwatobi Raji who came onboard. I shared the vision with her about the problem in the community and we were able to come up with the idea that we needed to hit the streets. Because it was Covid-19 period, instead of bringing the children together, we had to go to their various houses to engage the children as much as we could. Eventually, we got a member of the community who gave us an open field. We brought the children together, ensured that the COVID-19 rules were in place. This was the beginning of the execution of the initiative.
Who are the categories of people you work with?
Everyone I work with is a volunteer. Miss Oluwatobi is a volunteer and I have volunteer teachers. There are like eight of them.
Have you gotten a sponsor since you started three years ago?
We have partners but they are very few. We have individual sponsors who give to the children.
How has it been so far?
It has been challenging. The road hasn’t been easy, to be sincere. This is a ministry for us. It is a mission and we have to see that the environment we are in is good and comfortable for everyone to be here.
How do you see this vision in five years to come?
In five years to come, we are planning to get more established and get a permanent site because where we are is not ours yet to enhance us to be much more comfortable and be able to cater for the children. There are a lot of plans on the ground on how to bring the children out of the menace of society to a place where they could be nurtured.
Raji, the Co-founder and Project Manager for the School on the Street Initiative who is also a multiple rape survivor, shares her experiences.
What is the vision behind this project?
Three years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, we realised that there were a lot of out-of-school children in the Iyana Ilogbo community. We decided on how we could give back to the community and what we could do during the shutdown of schools. So, we took to the streets.
Children were part of the victims of COVID-19 as they were not able to do the regular classroom activities so I taught them the basic classroom activities. Later, a few people got motivated with what we were doing. We then moved to a proper school structure.
COVID-19 exposed other heinous crimes going on within the community such as high rate of cyber crime, teenage pregnancy, early marriage, hooliganism, child labour. COVID-19 enabled us to see other challenges aside-the-out-of school children. We were able to leverage the COVID-19 lockdown. What we did was provide an alternative education support for out-of -school children. By December when the government made a declaration that schools should reopen, we already had the courage to transfer the solution into a classroom setting so that the children could come to school and be safe. This has been on since September 2020 till now. The street project started in July 2020 initially while the proper classroom activities; the school on the streets initiative, kick-started in September 2020. And I’ve been here with the children since then.
Can you shed more light on how the School on the Street Initiative began?
From 2017 to 2020, before I joined School on the Street Initiative, I was into rescue missions for vulnerable children living in the streets. And I’ve had some success stories with children and teenagers I have picked from the streets and been keeping in a safe space. They go to school and are empowered. One of them is Faith, a pregnant young teen that God helped me to pick from the streets in Ikeja Underbridge in 2019. I put her in a safe space until she was delivered of her baby. In that safe shelter, she was empowered. What do you think would have happened if God had not used me? All these things happen by God’s strength and with the support of good Nigerians out there. When tell these stories, we get support.
Coming to School on the Street Initiative…it’s been a very massive project. Well I didn’t grow up here but I fell in love with the Iyana Ilogbo community. Coming here with my work partner who is the visionary and co-founder, we realised there were a lot of social vices here. We have 150 beneficiary pupils who attend the free elementary school at no cost and also, 80 percent of our beneficiary pupils who do not bring food to school but have a free school meal to themselves. We have partnered with a lot of other social institutions who donated food boxes to us, and even to the parents . But we’ve not received any grant. We have good partners that have been supporting using their resources, voices, platforms to showcase our activities to getting support to the children. The school offers 100 percent free tuition; from the uniforms, to the note books, our weekly assessment, text books, school socks, school shoes and school bags.
One of our goals is to have a proper safe space where we can keep the children that will take them from violence at home, violence within the society to have a right thinking mindset and to be focused.
We also desire that it won’t just stop at the elementary level as we desire to have a proper secondary school for the children.
How do you choose your beneficiaries?
We have specific people who get this support so it’s not just everybody but those with a genuine challenging story like have women who are currently undergoing domestic violence. We have cases of women abandoned and neglected by their husbands. We have a case of a father who left his wife and nine children. He said they told him somewhere that it was the wife that was blocking his progress. It is not right for children to suffer from consequence of the irresponsibility of their parents. One of the children stays with us for a temporary emergency shelter and the mother has practically done everything to support herself by doing menial jobs. It’s a pathetic situation that sometimes, we support them with feeding. We’ve also put in a plan of talking to her about family planning. We have cases of paternity denial in this community. It is high. We have a child staying with irresponsible parents and you hear something like, “Bring them out, we want to poison the children. When I kill them, this man will do what he is supposed to do”. Some of them are young mothers like 22 years old that have given birth to four to five children. It’s like a child giving birth to a child, and she doesn’t know the right thing to do. We have a case of a parent; we admitted their eldest daughter. The remaining two, the community executives told us to admit them. But we told them we have a policy; one per family.
They had to stand in the gap to be responsible for the children because the mother is a drug addict and the current husband is in prison. She’s currently not in her right senses and we are trying to see if we can get her in a rehab.
Another one, she has two children here and she’s with a 5th husband. We’ve tried to counsel and we realise that the foundation is the problem. No proper orientation, no education and no empowerment.
These are the challenges we are facing. Aside from the children, there’s a lot to be done with the parents. We have to go to the roots.