School safety as governance: 120 committee members trained in Hong
School-Based Management Committee members across Hong LGA were trained with ADSUBEB to apply the Safe School Declaration in their own schools and communities.
In 2023, 120 members of School-Based Management Committees across Hong Local Government Area were trained on the Safe School Declaration, in a programme delivered in collaboration with the Adamawa State Universal Basic Education Board.
The Safe School Declaration is an international commitment on protecting education from attack. The training covered its provisions and, more importantly, its application: what the commitment asks of the people who actually run a school, and what they are entitled to expect in return.
The choice of audience is the substance of this project. School-Based Management Committees already exist. They are the standing community bodies attached to schools, made up of people who live in the community and will still be there in five years. Training them embeds school safety in a structure that persists after a project closes, rather than in a committee created by the project and dissolved with it.
In the North East, school safety is a governance problem at least as much as an infrastructure problem. A perimeter fence does not decide whether a school reopens after an incident, whether attendance is monitored, whether a concern raised by a parent reaches anyone with authority to act. Those are committee questions. Which is why the training addressed mandate alongside knowledge: committee members need to know what the Declaration says, and they need to know that acting on it is within their remit.
The result recorded is that 120 committee members were trained, and that Safe School Declaration principles were introduced into school governance structures at community level across the LGA.
Delivering the training with ADSUBEB, the board that oversees basic education across Adamawa State, connected the committees to the structure they already report into. A community body trained in isolation has knowledge. A community body trained alongside its own supervising authority has a route for using it.
The project is recorded against Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 16 — quality education, and peace, justice and strong institutions. The pairing is exact. Keeping a school open through insecurity is an education outcome delivered by an institutional one.
