The Ondo State Government has announced a comprehensive lineup of events to mark the 2025 National Children’s Day celebration, aimed at celebrating, recognizing, and empowering children across the State.

Addressing the newsmen at a press conference held at the women affairs hall, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Women Affairs and Social Development, Mrs Seun Osamaye noted that the National Children’s Day celebration is being celebrated annually to celebrate, recognize, acknowledge and most importantly identify with children across the state especially in primary and secondary schools.

She added that the reason for doing this is to inform them and also to sensitize them on what government is doing to make lives better for them and of course to also ensure that there’s a continued contribution of government towards children development and child education in the states.

“For this year, we have brought about new innovations towards this year’s celebration that is a complete departure from what has been taking place in time past. Governor Aiyedatiwa has said that in his administration, in his agenda for children, the social welfare, the development, the access to health care of our children will be a priority”.

“This year’s celebration will not just go the way of the usual celebration but instead, the intellectual capacity of our children will be exposed especially, towards knowledge identification and also reward of every identified intellectual capacity of these children.

“In other words, we’ll be having several competitions in different areas to identify some of these students that will sell on that day and these students, these children will be representing their schools. These schools will be representing the local governments and what the Governor is trying to do is to encourage intellectual development, reading of books, taking their studies very serious among our students and pupils in schools.

“To start with, today we are having a workshop for strategic stakeholders in the education sector of the State and what we are doing in this workshop is to invite all strategic stakeholders in child education sector, stakeholders from Ministry of Education, stakeholders from Ministry of Women Affairs,  stakeholders from SUBEB, stakeholders from local governments, local government service commission and all other strategic stakeholders, principals of schools, headmasters of schools, ZEOs and AEOs.

“Apart from today’s workshop which will be Chaired by the SUBEB chairman, we’ll also be having the Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice who will be speaking to us on child rights law. The reason for doing this is to make the stakeholders on this year’s team which is to stand up, to speak up, building a polling free generation. The essence of doing this is to ensure that all stakeholders feed into the lined up activities and so when they go back to their different schools, agencies, they can teach our children policies and programs surrounding this team so that our children can further be prepared for this competition.

“Another activity which will be coming up tomorrow is the adult state children parliament’s visit to the state house of assembly. We’ll be meeting the Speaker at the State House of Assembly tomorrow and what we are doing tomorrow is to encourage these children to observe the plenary when it is ongoing and also to be able to encourage them to have access directly to first-hand information of what happens in the State House of Assembly. 

“Ondo State Children parliament which has been mouribond for over 12 decades will be resolved, the process has been initiated and tomorrow the children will be at the State House of Assembly. They’ll be introduced to the Speaker of the House and of course they’ll be observing plenary with the assistance of safety children international”.

She stressed that the children will be at a place between Wednesday and Thursday for the orientation program. A two-day orientation program where the parliamentarians will be taught the rudiments of their roles and what is expected of them in their new roles. 

She added that on Friday, there will be a pre-rehearsal for the children’s main day which will be coming up next week Tuesday. “On that day, there will be competitions.

According to her, the first competition will be an election skills competition among 18 selected schools where each of the schools will present their best speaker to speak on the theme and on that day, 2,500 children are expected from 100 schools across the local government of the State.

She opined that after the competition, there will also be a cultural display for each school to reflect the local heritage of their location. “What we are doing on that day is to showcase to Mr. Governor each peculiarities, each local heritage of each schools. Also, there will be match past.

She revealed that in each of the categories of the competition, the first winner will be given a lucky star prize of 500,000 Naira, the second position will go with a sum of 200,000 Naira and the third position too will be given a sum of 100,000 Naira. “So in each of these categories there are expected prizes to be won and these prizes, these trophies will come with some amount of money and all of these things is to promote unity, to promote love, to promote especially our children to be engaged and to understand what this year’s theme is all about. So that after the celebration throughout the year we can have a free bully schools”, she concluded.