OCI FOUNDATION TO SUPPORT TWO PAGEANTRY CONTESTS IN BENUE, NIGERIA (DECEMBER 17TH AND 24TH, 2020, RESPECTIVELY)

The OCI Foundation is pleased to announce that it will be officially supporting two different pageantry events in Benue State, Nigeria. The first of these is the “Face of Tiv International” beauty contest, which is being organized by the “Kano Tiv Carnival”, and will hold on Thursday, December the 17^th, 2020, at the City Bay Event Centre, Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria. The second is the “Tiv Cultural Carnival 2020″, which will hold from December 204th to the 24th in Gboko, Benue State, Nigeria.

The respective winners of the two pageantries will be crowned the “OCI Foundation’s Faces of the ArOY Campaign in Benue State”. They will play key roles in the Benue State’s flag-off ceremony of the Arm Our Youths (ArOY) Health Campaign. The flag-off ceremony will hold as soon as the COVID-19 lock-downs are eased across Nigeria.

The OCI Foundation’s participation in these events are parts of its quest to spread the ArOY Health Campaign, which seeks to make anti-breast and anti-cervical cancer information available to every Nigerian (more details below). The Foundation will, therefore, be publicizing its free, lifesaving “OCI CerviBreast” mobile phone application at the event.  The CerviBreast App is freely available on the Android and Apple stores, and can be downloaded by simply searching for “CerviBreast”.

The OCI Foundation will also be donating its customized T–shirts and ArOY Campaign textbooks to all the contestants (see sample images of the book and shirt below).

For the records, the ArOY Campaign is a novel, Harvard-endorsed, WHO-supported, and evidence-based health promotion initiative of the OCI Foundation, which is being introduced across all senior secondary schools in Nigeria as a way of tackling breast and cervical cancers. In September 2019, it was rolled out across all the 261 senior secondary schools in Anambra State of Nigeria, and a similar event, scheduled for Benue State in May 2020, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  All of Nigeria’s 36 states (and the FCT) are expected to benefit from the ArOY campaign on or before the end of 2025, and the ongoing consultations are part of this whole process.

The ArOY Health Campaign has the support of the, NextGenU.org (the World’s first online University), the United States Centers for Disease Control (U.S. CDC) and the University of British Columbia, Canada (ranked 45^th in the world, according to the 2021 QS World University Ranking). Experts from these institutions, along with others from the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) and the Griffith University (Australia), will work with the OCI Foundation and the Nigerian Government on the roll-out, implementation and monitoring of the ArOY project. In addition, the prestigious Harvard Medical School, USA, of which Dr Chris Ifediora (the Founder of the OCI Foundation) is an Alumnus of, had earlier endorsed the Campaign, and made significant contributions to the Campaign’s design ahead of its roll out in Anambra State last year.

A number of other reputable Nigerian institutions partnering the OCI Foundation on this initiative include the Innoson Group, the NYSC (National Office), the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs (Nigeria), Nollywood Nigeria, the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, the Anambra Broadcasting Service (ABS), Silk Road Restaurant (Abuja), and the Post Primary Schools Service Commission, PPSSC (Anambra state), among others.