Yatia Launches Page-Liberia Program

The Youth Against Tribalism In Africa has launched its Providing Access to Grassroot Education (PAGE-Liberia) Program in Buchanan Grand Bassa County. The Youth Against Tribalism In Africa (YATIA) is a registered non-governmental and nonprofit organization working with youth and communities to fight ethnic and religious discrimination, human rights violations, and fostering peaceful co-existence, democracy, transparency, education and economic growth and vitalization by instituting educational related programs in Liberia.

With an outstanding record in youth capacity building, mentorship, grassroots advocacy, education, peacebuilding and conflict resolution from a national and broader perspective, the institution since its inception in 2009, has partnered with local communities and international organizations implementing projects on education, policy advocacy, human rights, environment, peace, youth capacity building, democracy and conflict-related issues.

The project is geared towards benefiting 180 vulnerable students with educational support packages and instituting academic challenge activities so as to stimulate students academic excellence and encourage them to stay in school. The care packages include, book bags, copy books and uniforms. While the academic challenge activities will include Quizzing, Debating, Essay writing, and Science Fair competitions. The program is being sponsored by the United States Embassy in Monrovia, as part of its many supports to educational programs in Liberia.

Giving an overview of the Program, YATIA Executive Director, Matthew M. Fred disclosed that the initiative will help curtail the efforts of most at-risk children who parents have some disability, most especially kids from orphanages, Blind Association and the Group of 77 among others. Mr Fred noted that the project will also buttress the government effort to promote and implement the Propoor Agenda.

"Our initiative is going to help the mass number of kids under the age of 15 years who are not in school but involved in making money via picking scrap materials on dump sites, street trading, child labour, hence, becoming breadwinners due to economic hardship and parents inabilities to maintain them in school. We are also looking and concentrating on abandoned orphan children and children of visually impaired parents who have no means of extended and home support in the strive for grassroots education". he said.

He added that the project is being developed to fit the needs for academic development of students and motivate them towards creating a passion for hard study and schoolwork, thus, stimulating the development of more educational strategies and programs that will be designed to supplement the impact in order to achieve the same goal.

The Program according to him will also help support the essence of grassroots education and will be used as a case study to pull the attention of government agencies and other partners for a similar initiative in other parts of the country.

The launch which brought together a cross-section of students, instructors and local partners and county officials was followed by an intensive training with students and their instructors in essays writing, debating and debating procedure, how to implement a great science project for preparation of the program.