It had become a tradition for us at SOP Initiative to join in the annual celebration of the World Humanitarian Day on August 19. In 2018, we joined in to raise awareness on violence against the vulnerable and the unsuspecting ones.
The figure of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in our country is put at 2,181,218 (www.reliefweb.int) who have been displaced from their communities by insurgents and violence. They had been moved to camps serving as temporary homes with their means of livelihood suddenly taken from them thus having to rely on others for their daily bread until they finally get a new settlement to start over.
The following were our goals and objectives of this project:
- Raising our voices on social media and in our community to increase the awareness to stand against violence shown towards the vulnerable civilians in Nigeria.
- Reaching out to kind hearted people to donate food supply for the affected IDPs in Nigeria via physical locations serving as collection points published on the campaign’s official web page (http://connectcharity.sopinitiative.org/notatarget/locations).
- Reaching out to Nigerians to donate clothing items for the same purpose via our online secure portal (http://connectcharity.sopinitiative.org/notatarget/cash).
So we visited the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants, and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI) Southwest camp in Ikoyi Lagos on August 19, 2018, to make donations of items we had received and procured via the campaign to the IDPs at the camp. These included ten (50kg) bags of Rice and 7 bags of dry-cleaned clothing items.