West Africa exists today, as one of the poorest regions in the African continent and Nigeria being the richest country in the region, is sadly also rated the global headquarters of extreme poverty. The failure of the component countries to drive good political leadership and the inability to favourably utilize their vast natural and human resources towards economic development, have remained the basic factors responsible for the region’s widespread poverty. Hence, West Africa is perennially bedeviled by chronic socio-economic setbacks, which indeed have made life a difficult and unpleasant experience for over 80% of its total inhabitants, especially children and women.
The average “West African Child” is born into a world and a life of economic and socio-political uncertainties. Yearly, millions of poor kids, under the age of five years, die of treatable diseases, particularly nutrition-related ailments. They are highly exposed to all the risks associated with “child poverty” and these include hunger, starvation, malnutrition, sicknesses or diseases, internal displacement, deaths, child labour, domestic abuse, rights violation and other social disadvantages. Because they are always victims of the above-itemized social burdens, life is also always unpleasant for the average “West African Child”, as they live daily in hopelessness, deprivation and despair!
In Nigeria alone, over “13 million kids” are out of school and are victims of a broken future. Tens of millions of Nigerian children live in “child poverty” and lack access to foods, clean water, drugs or medicines. clothes, shelters and other basic necessities of life. If Nigeria, as the richest country in the West African region, is unable to offer its children a good life, what then could you imagine of the others? Therefore, “Fund4Kids” was created, in response to the critical need to drive humanitarian interventions designed for the welfare and socio-economic emancipation of poor and vulnerable children in West Africa, who are socially disadvantaged and in dire need of relief from the social threats of “child poverty”.