Children are change agents who can be groomed into leadership for a sustainable future. This was the motivation for the Child Health Environment and Safety Trust (CHEST) a children-based non-governmental organisation, to hold a leadership programme for secondary school students in Ibadan, Oyo State.
CHEST in partnership with other organisations namely: The Development School Africa and EkoPages, carried out a training for representatives of the junior secondary class two children of the Command Day Secondary School, Mokola, Ibadan on the theme “Education for Sustainable Development: Creating the Next Generation’s Sustainability Champions.”
The programme was geared towards communicating global, complex and diverse issues to children at a level that is required to drive sustainable development
Speaking at the event, founder and president of CHEST, Professor Godson Ana, said: “We are very strategic and passionate about nurturing a critical mass of future leaders to ensure that their environment is tranquil, have healthy ecosystems and the space they are in safe so that they can maximise their potentials to contribute to the development of the world.
“This year we are looking at sustainable development. The UN came up with 17 SDGs with a 2030 target. We believe that providing enough awareness for this mandate and taking it to the grassroot will help in the attainment of those goals.
“We are at Command Secondary School, Mokola, Ibadan. The children were very excited because they are learning new things – things that are being taught at universities but we are able to cascade this information to their level. We hope that by imbibing these tenets based on the various attributes of the SDGs, they will grow with them and become vanguards and change agents to influence their peers and members of society they are in.”
Professor Ana added that, “Children are agents, even among their peers. Once we have a critical mass of people that are informed, that can also inform others who are ignorant, it will go a long way. These children have parents that are in different segments of society such as the legislature or judiciary. They can go on to influence their parents.
“More importantly we are looking at issues not just for now, but building the consciousness of these children that will make them better leaders. We want to bequeath in these children leadership skills that will make them better leaders than us.”