Teresa Oyibo Ameh Is Doing Good For Vulnerable Girls Who Have No One To Help Them

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It is so sad to know that there are still many children who do not have access to good books to educate, inspire and nurture their minds. Many of the children are willing and eager to learn but their parents are probably too poor to get them good books to read.

Teresa Oyibo Ameh is doing a lot to change this narrative for some children. Through her Aunty Talatu Foundation, she writes and gives books to children, she also trains girls in different skills that can help them be financially independent in future.

Teresa Oyibo Ameh

Teresa Oyibo Ameh is the founder of Aunty Talatu Foundation. She studied Library Science at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. She is also a civil servant, a writer and an author.

She is an author of eight books for children; she runs a library project with two orphanages and also has a book club in her house for children. She is also involved in other initiatives for the girl child.

Why She started Aunty Talatu Foundation

It all began at the outpatient section of hospitals, I just felt this need to reach out to children because the average child is always scared of going to the hospital, it all started as a kind of therapy where we sang, danced and read stories.

My passion lies in children. I wrote a book in 2017, about a girl child in the North East, what she has to go through. It’s all about a girl losing her father and her twin brother who went to school. Her mother lost her mind and she went to the IDP camp where she was taken advantage of and impregnated.

After writing that book, I started thinking about what I should do about vulnerable girls who cannot take care of themselves, lost their parents and found themselves pregnant and have lost everybody. That’s why I started the empowerment scheme for the girl child. The first one was very successful and they are still doing it in a school in Dutse Alhaji, a nomadic school.

We taught them how to string beads and I took some of the beads to the United Nation’s CSW and they were all bought.

The good thing was that these girls were trained and when I went back to the school I discovered they were training other girls. So it now has a ripple effect, if we trained ten girls and they’ve been able to train twenty, invariably thirty girls have been trained.

The empowerment programme for the girl child was initiated so as to put an end to girls being vulnerable that a man will say “I’m marrying you because I want to feed you, the girl should be able to say I can feed myself”

Why She writes for children and gives her book away free

I write for children and since they can’t afford to buy books, it is difficult to get them to read, children may love books but most parents find it difficult in buying school prescribed books, to most of them buying storybooks isn’t on their list of priorities.

Writing is not necessarily for profit, it’s something one should do for passion, if I don’t do it, I may not have peace.