The TY Danjuma Foundation over the weekend, shared N200 million to 21 non-for-profit organisations for the implementation of education and health projects across the country.

The grants for 2020 cycle are expected to promote quality health care, maternal and child health, control and elimination of neglected tropical diseases as well as promote teachers’ training in eight states. The states are Akwa Ibom, Borno, Lagos, Imo, Edo, Taraba, Plateau as well as the Federal Capital Territory.

Speaking during a training session in Abuja to familiarise its grantee partners on monitoring and evaluation (M & E), acting chief executive officer of the Foundation, Gima Forje spoke on how projects funded are identified and selected for implementation
He said: “The foundation is purely a grant making organization, meaning that we have resources and we want to solve problems in health and education sectors. We want to solve these problems across Nigeria. So people identify where these needs are and they approach us.
“Ultimately we go through these requests and go to where the greatest needs are, the places we think we can use our resources to reach the highest number of people. It is a function of the needs in the communities.
“We plan to give out N200 million in 2020 in our main grants but throughout the year, we will be giving out additional funds through another scheme we call the discretional grants. So cumulatively, we will be giving out way in excess of N200m. For the main grants, we have 7 States and the FCT but in the course of the year, if there is an emergency somewhere, we will go there.”

Forje who revealed that the foundation has given out over N3 billion in the past 10 years, added that the foundation is bent on tackling the scourge of blindness.
“We work across board, there are three basic things we do in health. We work on preventable blindness, so whether it is at the primary or tertiary level, we support preventable blindness.

“If for instance, you have someone that has basic cataract, we can deal with that on the field. But if it is a more complex situation like bilateral or low congenital, we can’t deal with that on the field. We will take the case to a tertiary institution. We are not focused on segmentations like government.
“The second arm of health is maternal and child health while the third is Neglected Tropical Diseases. But it is important to state here that we renovate and strengthen a lot of primary and secondary healthcare institutions because we recognise that the majority of the people in the country access healthcare at the primary level.”
Forje further added that it is wrong to leave the challenges faced by vulnerable Nigerians to government alone.

The executive director, Mission To Save The Helpless, MITOSATH, Dr. Francisca Olamiju, who also spoke to newsmen, commended the foundation’s consistency and commitment to its areas of intervention over the years.
“TY Danjuma Foundation is very unique because it was set up on passion and it is Nigerian. It is indigenous and it is a foundation that General TY Danjuma (retd) himself set up to meet the needs of the people of Nigeria. It comes with training because they don’t just give you grants, they train you. After the training, they also visit for monitoring, evaluation and measurement of impact of their intervention.

“One of the impacts we have had is that for example, I can speak of Onchocersiasis
in Taraba state. We can proudly say that for the past ten years, we did not have anybody that has gone blind due to river blindness and it all started with General TY Danjuma Foundation and even the man himself. This is a success story that we can celebrate today,” she said.

The TY Danjuma Foundation was founded by former Chief of Army Staff and Minister of Defense, General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma (retd) in 2009, with focus on health and educational empowerment of people, particularly rural dwellers.