Odii Unveils Plan to End Child Hawking, House help Culture in Ebonyi

…Promises Skills Centres, Jobs, Scholarships Across 13 LGAs

By David Usman 

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate in Ebonyi State, Ifeanyi Chukwuma Odii, has unveiled plans to tackle child hawking, domestic servitude and other forms of child labour in the state if elected governor in 2027.

Odii disclosed this during an appearance on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily, where he outlined youth empowerment, education, skills acquisition and job creation as key components of his proposed administration.

He attributed the movement of children from their communities into domestic work, street hawking and other forms of labour partly to poverty and unemployment, saying many families are compelled by economic hardship to send their children away in search of opportunities.

The PDP candidate said his administration would tackle the root causes of the problem by establishing skills-acquisition centres across the state and equipping young people with practical skills that could enable them to secure employment or become self-employed.

“We’ll be reeducating our people. The youths, some of them, we train them in skills acquisition, building skills acquisition centres,” Odii said.

He listed carpentry, POP installation, tailoring, animal husbandry, fishery and other vocational skills among areas that would be covered by the proposed training programme.

According to him, the initiative would be implemented across all 13 local government areas of the state, with each local government provided with facilities capable of accommodating about 3,000 people.

“That means if we do that, we’re accommodating about 39,000 Ebonyians,” he said.

Odii also identified education as a critical component of his strategy to reduce child labour, promising to prioritise scholarships and improved learning environments to enable more children to remain in school rather than being pushed into economic activities at an early age.

He said his administration would equally invest in agriculture, healthcare and job creation as part of a broader strategy to reduce household poverty and improve the economic capacity of families.

The PDP candidate maintained that Ebonyi’s agricultural and mineral resources could be better harnessed to create jobs and increase household incomes, proposing greater investment in mechanised farming, rural roads, skills development and measures to attract private-sector investment.

Odii further argued that addressing child labour should go beyond simply prohibiting the practice, stressing the need for policies that tackle the economic conditions that make families vulnerable to sending children into domestic work and street trading.

He said creating sustainable opportunities within local communities would enable families to keep their children in school while giving young people the skills and economic opportunities needed to become productive members of society.

The proposals form part of Odii’s broader campaign agenda ahead of the 2027 Ebonyi governorship election, with poverty reduction, human-capital development, employment generation and economic diversification featuring prominently in his stated priorities.