BACKGROUND
Caregiver Concern Foundation, Africa Headquarters is located in Ogboli Awgu in Enugu State. This, with its surrounding communities, is the home of families out of work, coal miners, poor manual laborers, and barely subsisting families and market traders. It is mostly hillside, back city “Shanty-Towns” where most people who could not afford minimum standard rental homes in the Enugu City
coverage to form a highly communal substance. These communities have highly inadequate government infrastructures and very poorly built and maintained government elementary and high schools. As immediate survival is the most important need of these families and actually consumes their meager resources, they cannot afford to support their children’s education in a long term. Most of these young children either drop out of school on their own, or are actually pulled prematurely out of school by their own families to help in raising, means of livelihood. Most of these children end up as street-side and bus-stop vendors, and a good number of them are contracted off for years of servitude apprenticeship to masters and mistresses that exploit them extremely. Some of them, who are able to complete the contractual years of servitude, often return with little or no achievement of their own while others who could not cope with the demands of servitude abscond to chart their own course without any acquired skills. Due to these situations, these: young generation end up engaging in numerous delinquent activities leading to the rise in crime rate. Having been living among these communities, I observed that these children are basically intelligent and brilliant with passion and zeal to perform considerably good work in any occupation that they opportune to be engaged. The core aim of Caregiver Concern Foundation is to provide these children with skill development and enhancement opportunities to prepare them to be more viable employment and relevance in the society. We hope that this will help them to project positive image and be effective role model for those coming after them. By helping to build the community, they will in turn, earn respect of the society. A second aspect of the mission is counseling and materials assistance to pregnant young women, mostly teenagers, who conceived outside traditional marriages. The communities surrounding my parish, like most Nigerian societies, are very conservative and greatly frown at canal relationship between people of opposite sexes, as a result, conceptions by women outside wedlock is regarded as “illicit pregnancy” and out rightly rejected. Such women are viewed as great humiliation and embarrassment to their families, exacting extreme wrath from them. Many families could not condone such mistakes and outrightly reject both the woman and her pregnancy. Our society has traditionally inherited inequalities between males and females that put the repercussions of this mistake mostly on the females while the males are let off comparatively light with mere admonitions. In our culture, only traditional bride price (Dowry) entitles privilege and protection to both the women and the children, both legally and culturally binds the man to be responsible for them financially and otherwise. This implies that when a young woman conceives outside wedlock, she is practically on her own, she has no legal or traditional case or claims against the man, and the child has no inheritance rights. This is why the society seriously emphasizes and teaches avoidance of pre-marital sexual relationships and punishes family members extremely when they fail in this expectation, because it denies her family both traditional and legal powers’ to fight for her cause. Such young women are now left to their own device. Already coming from mostly poor backgrounds with zero chance of earning income, the women become cheap victims of extreme exploitation by camouflage sympathizers who offer them barely minimum support of temporary shelter in return for their babies after they are born. They now give these babies out to the highest bidder of adoptive parents. The plain fact is that these babies are practically sold for maximum profit for what they barely spent to take care of their mothers during their period of pregnancy. While the young mothers are sent home practically empty-handed, their babies are “adopted” for as much as equivalent of $ 5000 to only those who can financially afford such fees. The pitiful thing is that these young mothers, who ordinarily would have wished to keep their children if they can earn a living, actually consider themselves fortunate to have the opportunity to such exploitation. Most of those women who tried to keep their children are going through excruciating pains of survival to do such that some of them end up abandoning their children to their fates. This is one of the major sources of abandoned children that this program plans to protect.
