 The Lagos residents have been charged to take ownership of projects undertaken by governments in their areas as to go a long way in tackling the issue of abandoned projects. This charge was given by the Inspired Youth Network during their citizens engagement town hall meeting with stakeholders on addressing public requests from the 2024 budget of Lagos state. Details in this report. How do we have the energy to send back what we know of Lagos? To ensure that young persons, especially young women, have access to democratic public responsive services. Over time, the stakeholders have monitored the implementation of budgets and are here to discuss the findings from their track ends on abandoned government projects in Oshodi's solo local government area. The idea is for the community to take actions towards the completion of the project. Great budget for all of this. Let budget that you have created be used for the completion of this project. And we have one in Okorodu currently. The one where the Okorodu is a vocational centre as big as Okorodu is. We only have one or two vocational centres being managed by the Lagos State Minister of Women Affairs and Poverty alleviation. Now this is another vocational centre that can complement the effort of the one Lagos State government is currently running. If we have a large number of people going to one vocational centre, we will not have good effective training and learning, or effective learning in all these vocational centres. The idea was to go monitor the projects that was going on in Ido-Urufi streets in Agopa last week and we found that constructions were not really ongoing the way it should be. And this was causing some issues leading to drainage problems. And of course all of this can also result in diseases and displacement of people. So we tried to bring up these issues to the limelight to let people know that there is actually a budget allocated for this particular construction and they need to demand for accountability so that the right things are being done. The town hall meeting also aims at educating relevant stakeholders to be involved in the budgeting process and ensure good governance. As government is advised to meet with the people halfway in this discourse. From all of our engagement so far, from exception, you could see that the major challenge there is that most, the majority of the persons in Lagos do not really have a better understanding about budgets, processes and the rest. So that's why we're doing all of this to see how we can educate the citizens to allow them to be a part of the process to actually drive a change in their society. It's good that organisations like these are coming up with such engagement in order to know what their resources are meant and are useful. And you know, if we do not accommodate such programmes like this, going forward we may not be able to achieve anything. This is more like helping government to lessen their work and all of their burden. So you know, I think it's something we have to also encourage and actually listen to them. And that's one of the reasons why I find it like I have to be here today. In order to urge the government to look into the abandoned project and ensure their completion, as it would not cost anything more since they have been budgeted for in the first instance. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.