Why Yargote Matters in Boy-Child Empowerment

By Adamu Lawal Toro

A policy is only as good as the organisation willing to carry it into a classroom, a street corner or a community hall where an actual boy is standing. Nigeria now has that policy, in the form of the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs’ first National Boy-Child Policy. What it needs next is proof that the idea can survive contact with reality. In Abuja, an organisation called the Yargote Foundation has been quietly supplying that proof for three years, and its work deserves far more attention than it has received.

A campaign that predates the policy
Yargote Foundation for Children, Youth and Women Development was founded in 2017 with a broad mandate spanning advocacy, education, psycho-social support and community development. But its flagship initiative, the Empower the Boy-child Project, now in its third year, is the part of that mandate most relevant to the national conversation unfolding today. Long before government formally acknowledged boys as a distinct vulnerability group, Yargote was already building mentorship structures, life skills training, mental health support and leadership development specifically for boys in under-served communities. That is the kind of head start policy cannot manufacture after the fact. It has to be built patiently, on the ground, over years.

This is precisely why the boy-child campaign is pertinent now, and why Yargote’s example matters inside that argument. A national policy launched with fanfare risks becoming another document that gathers dust once the news cycle moves on. What prevents that fate is the existence of organisations already doing the unglamorous work of delivery, so that policy has somewhere real to land.

What the work actually looks like
Strip away the language of advocacy and the foundation’s record is concrete. Two full cohorts of boys have graduated from a structured six-month empowerment programme. Hundreds more have been reached through school outreaches and structured sessions. Annual summits and advocacy walks marking the International Day of the Boy-child have kept the issue visible in Abuja’s civic calendar.
Partnerships with schools and community stakeholders have widened the project’s reach beyond what any single organisation could manage alone, and a dedicated Safe Space for Boys, currently under development, aims to give the project a permanent physical home rather than a series of scattered interventions.

That last point deserves emphasis. Much of what ails the boy-child in Nigeria, whether in the Almajiri corridors of the north or the informal settlements of the capital, is the absence of any safe, structured space where a boy can simply be a child without being asked to perform toughness or self-sufficiency he has not yet earned. A physical safe space is not a soft add-on to boy-child advocacy. It is arguably the missing infrastructure the entire campaign has lacked.

Balance, not substitution
One of Yargote’s stated values is balance, restoring gender advocacy to include both boys and girls rather than treating one as a substitute for the other. That framing matters in a country where boy-child advocacy is too often, and wrongly, read as a rebuke of girl-child gains. Yargote’s model does not ask Nigeria to choose. It asks the country to finish a job it only half started, extending to boys the same deliberate, structured investment that decades of girl-child advocacy proved could work.

The foundation’s other stated values, responsibility, compassion and discipline, translate in practice into programming that treats boys as young people in need of guidance rather than problems to be managed. That distinction is not cosmetic. A generation of boys raised to believe they must simply “figure it out” is the same generation now overrepresented among school dropouts, and in the worst cases, among recruits for armed groups in the north. Organisations like Yargote are demonstrating, cohort by cohort, that the alternative to neglect is not complicated. It is mentorship, consistency and a safe place to grow.
What the country should take from this
Government has finally produced a policy framework for the boy-child. Civil society organisations, media houses and religious and community leaders now have a narrow window to convert that framework into something durable, and Yargote’s three years of grounded work is a template worth studying rather than reinventing. Scaling a model like this beyond Abuja, into the northern states where the boy-child crisis is most acute, should be a policy priority in its own right, not an afterthought left to whichever NGO happens to have the funding.

Nigeria spent thirty years learning, correctly, that girl-child advocacy needed sustained institutional backing to succeed rather than good intentions alone. The boy-child campaign is at the point in that same learning curve now, and organisations like Yargote Foundation are showing what sustained, structured backing actually looks like when it is done well. The policy in Abuja gave the campaign its mandate. Foundations doing the daily work of mentorship and safe spaces are giving it a chance to actually succeed.