Idia Renaissance, a non-governmental organization in Benin city in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Friday October 29th presented awards of excellence to the best schools in its comic book development exhibition/competition organized to create awareness on the risk of human trafficking and dangers of irregular migration amongst the younger persons.

The comic book competition, according to project team lead Mrs Bolatito Ironbar, was designed to achieve two main objectives of prevention and increasing awareness on the menace of human trafficking particularly trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation.

Mrs.Ironbar ,in her remarks during the grand finale ceremony ,said the project commenced on September 21st with two representatives of staff advisers and five students from the participating schools with the idiaRenaissance project team and the comic consultant.

She said ” To build on the prevention programming activities, Idia Renaissance in partnership with UNHCR’s Telling the Real Story (TRS) project engaged young people from 9 SEA HUB secondary schools to develop comic books .

“Comic books as we all know have the potential to ignite the interest of young readers who can easily understand and communicate and deal with social problems using visual and text information to tell stories of the risk in human trafficking and irregular migration in our society.

“The project objectives ,expectations and work plan which was effectively communicated to all 9 schools involved storyline, drawing images, messages and colouring images development beginning from September 27th to Oct 15th in various schools while monitoring and evaluation of all the artwork developed was carried out by the project officers of the idiaRenaissance ahead of the grand finale of the project” Mrs.Ironbar added.

Also speaking, the project manager of IdiaRenaissance Mr.Roland Nwoha said ” the essence of the artwork exhibition was to create a comic book which would readily appeal to young people using the strategy of comic book and in achieving this, nine secondary schools from idiaRenaissance students entrepreneurship activities (SEA HUB club) in Oredo local government area were engaged.

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“We intend to use this artwork platform to reach out to other youths in the society within and outside the state as the 3 best comic artwork would be put together to form a comic book that would easily demonstrate all the risk in human trafficking and irregular migration and hopefully we intend to carry-on with this initiative ” Nwoha added.

On her part ,Mrs.Unyime Johnson , Associate Project officer UNCHR Benin city while congratulating the 3 schools for their efforts in emerging winners, advised others to avail themselves of the opportunity of performing better in the next edition adding that submissions from the exhibition would be used to engage young persons on social media .

The nine schools which participated in the exhibition of comic artwork are Itohan Girls Grammar school, World faith Group of school, Iyekogba Grammar school, Edo college, Ebenezer Secondary school , Lydia Group of schools, Anglican Girls Grammar school ,Oredo Girls Grammar school and St.Maria Goretti Girls Grammar school.

Speaking in an interview with journalists in Benin city after Ebenezer Secondary school emerged overall best with 43.9% followed by Iyekogba Grammar school with 42.42% and Itohan Girls Grammar school with 42.1%, Mrs.Ironbar said the comic artwork from the 3 schools will be published as one book and shared to all schools within and outside the state while soft copies would be made available for online users on its social media platform.

The panel of judges for the comic artwork development project exhibition were drawn from National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP),Edo state taskforce Against Human trafficking (ETAHT),Partners in Awareness Creation Against Human Trafficking and Irregular Migration (PACHTIM)

Others are Network of Civil Society Organization Against Child Trafficking Abuse and labour (NACTAL),International Organization for Migration (IOM),Girls Power Initiative (GPI) ,CARITAS Nigeria, Patriotic Citizen Initiative (PCI), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR),GIZ SEDIN.