The management of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp, Uhogua, Edo, says that 90 per cent of the IDP students who sat for the June/July National Business and Technical Examinations Board (NABTEB) were successful.
Pst. Evelyn Omigie, the Assistant Coordinator of the camp, managed by the Home for the Needy Foundation, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday, in Benin.
Omigie said that 117 students from the camp sat for the examination, out of which 99 came out successful in the result released recently.
She added that 59 of the students enrolled for science subjects and 43 for arts subjects, out of which 45 for science and 39 for arts, respectively, cleared all their papers.
She added that the 15 students that enrolled for social sciences in the exams were all successful.
Omigie appealed to corporate bodies and kind hearted Nigerians to come to the aid of the IDP students in the camp through scholarships, to further their education.
The assistant camp coordinator said that the appeal had become necessary to ameliorate the plight of the students who had excelled in their academics.
She said they were becoming frustrated as the camp management was grappling with the challenge of funding their education.
Omigie attributed the successes recorded by the IDP students in the camp to God, orientation by the management, focus and determination, while appealing that the IDPs should not be allowed to waste their potential.
“This is why we are appealing to corporate bodies, scholarship awarding organisations, NGOs, kind spirited Nigerians, International organisations and even the government to come to the aid of these budding talents.
“These are future scientists, doctors, architects, presidents, governors, aeronautic engineers in the making and they need to be offered scholarships to pursue their education and their dreams.
“These are people who were highly traumatised when they came here, but we were able to show them love, counsel them and backed them with prayers, and we succeeded in pulling them out of their trauma.
“The least we can do for them is to help them pursue their dreams, so that they could be relevant to themselves and the society at large.
“But, right now we are facing so many challenges. In fact, these challenges had been on since 2019, which has forced some of those even in the tertiary institutions to drop out of school”, she said.
Omigie added: “As we speak, we have a dearth of teachers in our school here, so it’s even the undergraduate IDPs that are helping to teach and prepare them for external exams.
“Please, we need support and encouragement in every way, including feeding and payment of teachers. Several of our teachers had to leave because we could no longer pay them
“We are also finding it difficult to provide writing materials, desks and chairs, among other instructional materials,” she said. (NAN)
