Comfort Maduakoh

Comfort Maduakoh is helping to break the intergenerational cycle of rural poverty by establishing facilities that provide both preschool education for children and primary healthcare education for mothers under one roof.

Realizing the potential of education to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, Comfort designs centers in which poor children and their mothers receive education that allows them to live fuller, healthier lives.
Childcare facilities are not new; they exist in most urban centers in Nigeria. Comfort's idea, however, is novel in four ways. First, her centers emphasize education as a major component of responsible childcare. Second, her centers target children of the rural poor, a grossly underserved population. Third, the centers focus on health care for children and mothers alike. For example, centers organize and keep children's immunization records, in addition to other health information. And finally, Comfort's design ensures widespread community support. Communities provide physical space for the centers and contribute resources for their upkeep. The children's mothers volunteer as helpers, thereby keeping down operating costs and intimately engaging them in their children's learning.
Comfort intends to use the centers as a springboard for introducing primary healthcare training for mothers because she believes that children's illnesses, which contribute to the stunting of their educational development, are mainly due to the mothers' ignorance of sound healthcare practices. Comfort's model is replicable in poor rural communities across Nigeria and beyond.

In most rural areas in Nigeria, there is a dearth of well-run educational facilities for children and a total absence of those that combine preschool learning opportunities with healthcare monitoring and training. Furthermore, the available schools are usually fee-paying, making it nearly impossible for children of the very poor to attend school consistently. In fact, rural women typically take their children with them wherever they go, whether to the farm or the market. This often is a substantial burden for the mothers, and can result in physical problems, especially backaches from carrying heavy loads on their heads and their children on their backs.
In Okwelle, Comfort's community, the Protestant church set up a nursery school, but because it is fee-based, it is unaffordable for many parents. Furthermore, because the Protestant church runs it, many of the Catholics refuse to send their children to it. For most villagers, the solution is either not to send their children to school at all or wait until they are old enough for primary school and then send them to the poorly run, but free, government school a few kilometers from the village. Invariably these children lag behind; only rarely do they catch up academically with those who have had a preschool foundation. This continuing lack of adequate education ensures the recycling of poverty, as these children do not have the opportunity for upward mobility and positive economic choices. Nigeria's uneducated citizenry causes economic development and democracy in the country to remain at rudimentary levels.

Beginning with one center for twenty children, Comfort now has established two unique and innovative childcare and education facilities for over one hundred children of poor rural families.
To ensure sustainability of the project, Comfort's first task was to get the community interested and involved in her idea. Through persistence, she convinced the community to donate buildings for the schools. Most village schools suffer a high staff turnover, and as a result, gaps in teaching, because many young teachers migrate to the urban centers in search of better employment and living conditions. To avoid this problem, Comfort convinced a retired teacher who lives in the community to run the schools.
The parents of the children donate their time and talents to Comfort's centers. The centers employ four full-time assistants paid for by Comfort, but with the rapid expansion of the centers, there is a need for more helpers. Rather than increase the cost of operation by employing more assistants, parents are encouraged to take turns helping out at the school. This gives them the chance to be near their children, while also breaking the barrier of fear of formal education that many of these women have. Because of their illiteracy, most are reluctant to even enter a classroom. By bringing them into a learning environment with their children, Comfort ensures that parents become more comfortable with and supportive of education. They may also be more willing to accept the healthcare training that Comfort intends to offer.
Comfort wants to introduce healthcare education to the mothers of the children in her center because many of the children's health problems are a result of poor hygiene and the mothers' limited primary care knowledge. As a trained nurse, Comfort believes that many of the health problems the children suffer can easily be managed within the low income of the children's families, if parents have the necessary information and education. She hopes to introduce these classes sometime next year.
Comfort charges a token fee for each term to encourage the parents to commit to bringing the children to the center. However, mindful of the fact that not all parents can afford even this token fee and not wishing to turn anyone away for lack of funds, Comfort does not insist on payment of the fee as a precondition for enrollment. Instead she allows the parents who cannot afford the fee to bring items that can be useful to the center, such as brooms, mats, baskets, and chalk. She raises funds for the center through the annual Christmas party she organizes, where prominent Nigerians are invited to see the progress the children are making. Many make cash donations and offer the children scholarships at this event. To further encourage community involvement and support for the activities of the center, Comfort also organizes community meetings where important issues relating to the center and the children are openly discussed.
Comfort is planning to spread her idea beyond the initial community through various ways. First, as an influential and respected senior citizen, Comfort has many contacts at executive levels in both the private sector and government, and she is exploiting these to raise funds for the establishment of other centers. Already she has met with officials at the state level, and they are discussing the technicalities involved in adapting the model to other villages. To ensure that villages have help in setting up their centers, Comfort is training two young women every year to provide necessary administrative support. As her funding improves, she hopes to increase the number of these trained young women. She is adamant that the cost of running the centers must be kept to what each community can afford, because if communities begin to depend on external funding, the centers are not likely to survive. Comfort is also spreading her idea through her work with a prominent national rural development organization. She is effectively making the case that her centers should be a prominent part of development plans in Nigeria.

The mother of four children, Comfort is a sixty-year-old retired nurse and a retired professional in the hotel and hospitality business. She has both national and international work experience. During the Nigerian-Biafran war, she worked in Biafran refugee camps, receiving for her efforts the Red Cross award for service to humanity. She retired in 1995 and went back to her village to live. While watching the sun set one evening, she saw exhausted women returning from the farms with wares on their head, children on their backs, and one child in each hand. Deeply moved by the plight of these families, she began to design her innovative early childhood education centers. She is committed to her idea and looks forward to seeing the spread of her model to rural villages all over Nigeria. The children who graduate from her schools are testimonies to her hard work and dedication: as she had hoped, they compare favorably with children from urban schools and thus have the promise of better lives in the future. Comfort feels satisfied that her main objective of breaking the cycle of poverty is slowly but surely being realized.