TIJCEF Extends Support to Children During 2023 Katsina Orphanage Outreach
The Tijwun Care and Empowerment Foundation (TIJCEF) extended its humanitarian activities to vulnerable children in Katsina State in 2023, when the Foundation, through its Executive Director, visited an orphanage in Katsina and donated gifts to children at the facility.
The outreach formed part of TIJCEF’s early humanitarian engagements and reflected the organisation’s commitment to supporting vulnerable groups while promoting dignity, care and social inclusion.
During the visit, the Foundation’s Executive Director interacted with children at the orphanage and presented gifts as TIJCEF sought to demonstrate solidarity with children living outside conventional family environments.
The intervention falls under TIJCEF’s Dignity pillar, which focuses on recognising the inherent worth of individuals, particularly children, women and other people experiencing vulnerable circumstances.
Unlike the Foundation’s school empowerment programmes, the Katsina outreach was primarily a humanitarian and social-support intervention. Its immediate documented outcome was the visit itself and the provision of gifts to children at the orphanage.
TIJCEF has not attached an unverified beneficiary figure or monetary value to the intervention, maintaining a distinction between documented programme information and figures that cannot presently be confirmed from available records.
2023 Outreach Takes TIJCEF’s Work to Katsina
The outreach represented TIJCEF’s engagement beyond a conventional training or school environment.
By visiting an orphanage directly, the Foundation was able to take its humanitarian support to children living in an institutional-care setting.
The gifts donated during the visit provided the material component of the intervention, while the physical presence of the Foundation’s leadership demonstrated an effort to engage directly with the children rather than limiting support to remote donations.
The programme took place at a time when child poverty and vulnerability remained major development challenges across Nigeria.
UNICEF’s 2023 Annual Report for Nigeria reported that more than half of Nigerian children aged 0–17 were living in multidimensional poverty, with children in rural and conflict-affected areas particularly affected.
Earlier national child-poverty analysis produced by the Federal Government, National Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF estimated that approximately 54 per cent of Nigerian children were multidimensionally poor, meaning they experienced deprivation in at least three dimensions of child rights, including areas such as nutrition, health, education, water, sanitation, housing and access to information.
The figures demonstrate the broader environment in which relatively small humanitarian interventions such as TIJCEF’s Katsina outreach operate.
Supporting Children Beyond Material Donations
Although gifts formed the material component of the 2023 outreach, the intervention also placed attention on children who can easily remain outside the focus of mainstream community activities.
Children living in orphanages and other forms of residential care may require support extending beyond material needs.
Nigeria’s National Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, developed by the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs with support from UNICEF and SOS Children’s Villages, recognise that children without appropriate parental care can face risks including neglect, abuse and exploitation. The framework seeks to standardise services and strengthen protection for children requiring alternative care.
This wider child-protection environment gives additional context to TIJCEF’s decision to engage children at an orphanage.
The Foundation does not claim that the donation addressed every need confronting the children or that one visit permanently transformed their circumstances.
Rather, the outreach represents a documented act of humanitarian engagement with a vulnerable group.
That distinction is important to TIJCEF’s approach to impact reporting.
Child Vulnerability Remains a National Challenge
Nigeria’s child population is enormous.
The Federal Government and UNICEF’s updated situation analysis estimates that the country has nearly 105 million children and adolescents aged 0–17, representing approximately half of Nigeria’s population.
This makes child welfare a significant national development issue.
The challenges extend beyond poverty.
UNICEF reports that violence against children occurs in homes, schools and communities and states that six out of every 10 Nigerian children experience some form of violence. The organisation also reports that only a small proportion of children who experience and report violence receive support.
These statistics do not describe the individual children involved in TIJCEF’s Katsina outreach, and they should not be interpreted as evidence that children at the visited orphanage experienced those specific circumstances.
Instead, they provide national context demonstrating why child protection, social inclusion and support for vulnerable children remain important areas of development work in Nigeria.
Dignity at the Centre of TIJCEF’s Engagement
TIJCEF classifies the Katsina outreach under its Dignity pillar because the intervention was centred on recognising and supporting children experiencing vulnerable circumstances.
The Foundation’s dignity approach requires more than viewing beneficiaries as recipients of donations.
It recognises children as individuals whose circumstances should not determine their worth or limit society’s responsibility towards them.
For TIJCEF, this means humanitarian engagement should respect the people receiving support.
The children reached through the Katsina outreach should therefore not be reduced to images of vulnerability.
They are children with individual personalities, ambitions and potential.
This principle is particularly important when reporting programmes involving minors.
Responsible development communication requires organisations to balance the need to document activities with the responsibility to protect children’s privacy and dignity.
Programme photographs can provide evidence that an outreach occurred, but photographs involving children should be handled carefully and in accordance with appropriate consent and safeguarding practices.
Outreach Adds to TIJCEF’s Humanitarian Record
The 2023 Katsina intervention is also significant in documenting the development of TIJCEF’s programme activities over time.
While some of the Foundation’s later interventions have focused on leadership, girls’ empowerment, STEM exposure and capacity development, the Katsina programme demonstrates a humanitarian dimension to the organisation’s work.
It provides evidence that TIJCEF’s activities have included direct engagement with vulnerable children alongside its educational and empowerment programmes.
The intervention also illustrates the difference between different types of impact.
In a training programme, TIJCEF may measure knowledge gained or skills acquired.
In an empowerment programme, the Foundation may examine confidence, participation or subsequent action.
For a humanitarian donation, the most immediate measures are different: the beneficiaries reached, the materials supplied and the immediate purpose for which those materials were provided.
In the case of the Katsina outreach, TIJCEF is reporting only what is currently verifiable: the outreach took place in Katsina in 2023 through the Foundation’s Executive Director, and gifts were donated to children at the orphanage.
The Foundation is not assigning an unsupported number of beneficiaries, an estimated financial value to the donations or an unmeasured percentage improvement in child wellbeing.
Nigeria Moves to Strengthen Alternative Care
Nigeria has since taken further steps to strengthen the framework governing children who require alternative care.
The National Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children provide a regulatory framework intended to standardise services for vulnerable children without appropriate care, including children deprived of a family environment.
Such national measures underline the importance of ensuring that support for children in residential settings goes beyond occasional charitable assistance.
Government institutions retain the primary responsibility for establishing and enforcing effective child-protection systems.
Civil society organisations, communities, families, development partners and responsible private organisations can complement those systems through carefully designed interventions.
For TIJCEF, this creates opportunities for future partnerships in areas such as education, mentorship, skills exposure and other forms of support where needs are clearly identified by responsible institutions.
A Documented Act of Care
TIJCEF’s 2023 Katsina orphanage outreach may have been relatively modest in scale compared with large national development programmes, but its significance lies in what can be clearly documented.
The Foundation went to the orphanage.
Its Executive Director participated directly in the engagement.
Children at the facility were reached.
And gifts were donated.
Those facts provide the basis of the programme report.
Rather than exaggerating the outreach by describing a single donation as a complete solution to child vulnerability, TIJCEF places the intervention within a broader commitment to dignity and humanitarian service.
The national evidence shows why such concern remains relevant. Millions of Nigerian children experience overlapping forms of deprivation, while children without appropriate parental care require particularly strong systems of protection and support.
For TIJCEF, the Katsina outreach represents one contribution within that much larger challenge.
It also captures the central principle behind the Foundation’s Dignity pillar: vulnerable circumstances should never make a child invisible.
Through the 2023 outreach, TIJCEF translated that principle into direct engagement by visiting children, spending time within their environment and providing gifts as an expression of care and social solidarity.