The Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) project and the Nigerian Red Cross Society have started teaching 6,000 students in Katsina State's schools how to deal with emergencies and manage disasters.
Dr Aliyu Idris Funtua, state chairman of the Red Cross Society, said at the training on Wednesday that the trainees were chosen from among 578 secondary schools in the state's three senatorial zones.
He said the training was intended to familiarise the instructors and children with techniques for administering first aid, handling emergency situations, and managing disasters at their local schools.
According to him, “The training is also centred on the subheadings of student protection and safeguarding, violence in schools, assertiveness, negotiation skills and evacuation drills.”
He, however, noted that the society had trained 3,000 members as first aiders and provided basic first aid training for regular marshals of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) in the state, saying that over 800 volunteers across the state received emergency training on disaster management.
Earlier, the state Coordinator of the AGILE project, Mustapha Shehu, said the critical issues of gender-based violence, evacuation techniques and drills were also administered to the students and teachers to help themselves, including identifying early warning of attacks.
He said: “In the end, our hope is that we will build the capacity of students and teachers in these areas and the Red Cross will support us to go around all the schools to step down this training which will take us to the last level of establishing school safety clubs.”