Bethesda: Creating safe
base for children
By OKOYE CHINENYE and OGOCHUKWU NKWUAKU
Saturday,
October 21, 2006
 |
•Ronke
Oluwaniyi
Photo By Sun News Publishing |
|
Bethesda is an NGO rooted in caring for children. A member
of the governing board, Ronke Oluwaniyi told Saturday Sun
that the ideals of the agency is anchored in providing basic
social services for children in poor communities. Ronke, an
Insurance Services Manager with UBA Plc gave an insight into
the inner workings of the NGO.
How it started
She noted that Bethesda started about four years ago by Mrs.
Nkoyo Rapu, the Project Co-ordinator of Bethesda Child Support
Agency. According to her, the initial vision of the Organization
is to make education available to everyone especially the
less privileged and people in remote areas.
“Mrs. Rapu saw the need for the less privileged children
to go to school. So, what she did was to find some people
who can pay some of these children’s school fees to
put them in school. This is how our scholarship scheme was
birth and we’ve been running on this scheme for some
couple of years now. Our scholarship scheme is meant for children
from under-privilege families that parent cannot afford to
send them to school or they don’t even have parents,
they are disadvantage in some way and so, we find people who
will pay their school fees, we call it “Adopt a child
scheme”.
“Eventually, we saw the need for school in poor communities
and so, Bethesda school was birth and this school is in Ikota,
Lagos. We have plans to expand to other remote areas. Ikota
is a very poor and under-privileged area. We bought some land
there, cleared it and built Bethesda School. Here, we give
free education to these children and we ensure that the school
is kept at a standard. To tell you the truth, this school
has really brought some changes there”.
Other services
Asked of other services Bethesda provides to these children,
Ronke said: Like I said earlier, we stand in as parents to
these children. We mentor, feed and at times clothe them.
Apart from this, we empower these children spiritually, though
it is non-denominational, it is free and open to anybody but
they need that spiritual empowerment.
Again, we basically want to break the challenges of circles
of poverty, that is to say, someone who come from a poor family
is likely to be poor and the children are likely to be poor.
We want to introduce a way where education will make the difference,
make you have a future and therefore you start fighting for
it. Also, when necessary health care services are provided
by professionals in our volunteer team”.
Source of fund
Our major set back and challenge here is fund because it is
not like we have money somewhere and say to ourselves lets
just go and pick from this money and start all these. How
we get the fund is that we charge the kind-hearted Nigerians
who understand our vision N10, 000 to keep a child in Bethesda
school. Some other people make donations because they want
to be a part of our vision. We also source for corporate funding
and international funding to make the work grow. I must tell
you some corporate bodies like UNICEF, Reliance Bank, Tetrazini,
African Child Trust, National Bank and others are really trying
for us. But, we also like to use this medium to inform others
that we need their support to see these children through.
Impacts so far
Well, we’ve had about hundred and fifty children under
the Bethesda scheme. We have over eighty children in our school
and we have about seventy on our scholarship scheme. Lately,
we have a young man who has graduated under this scheme and
is currently doing a volunteer work with us. Like I said earlier,
we already have a structure put in place for these children
at Ikota and we are planing to expand to other remote areas,
here in Lagos and possibly to other states very soon.
Challenges
According to her, the NGO’s major challenge is maintaining
their integrity. “Our challenges is basically integrity,
you know with what is obtainable here, even when people identify
with a vision, they are afraid that we are going to spend
their money or cheat them. But, we’ve have taken step
to put structure in place to make sure our system has integrity.
We have people on our Board of Trustees who are notable people
in our environment. This is not to say that we are looking
down on people but we want to show integrity. And so, we have
KPMG who offer their services to us. They do account to us
for free and we have people like Adepetun, Caxton Martins
and Agbor who sponsor some of these children in our Scholarship
Scheme”, she said.
|
