PROMOTING DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP AND ONLINE SAFETY THROUGH SCHOOL-BASED COUNSELLING: A MULTI-STAKEHOLDER PROGRAMME EVALUATION IN OFFA, KWARA STATE, NIGERIA

Digital literacy and online-safety education remains unevenly distributed across Nigerian schools, with structured interventions often less accessible in communities outside major urban centres. This paper reports a descriptive, practitioner-led evaluation of the TES Step-Down Programme, a community-based digital-literacy and online-safety intervention delivered in Offa, Kwara State, Nigeria, in September 2025 through a partnership between the HADIS Foundation and a school counselling unit. The evaluation was guided by four objectives and four research questions; no hypotheses were formulated because the data available to the author did not permit inferential testing. The intervention involved 130 participants (58 males and 72 females) drawn from four purposively included schools, comprising 90 students, 30 teachers and counsellors, and 10 parents or Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) representatives; one participating school served learners with sensory disabilities. Data were obtained from attendance records, a baseline survey, pre- and post-intervention assessment instruments administered on Days 1 and 3 and analysed by the programme data manager into a compiled summary, facilitator- and monitoring-and-evaluation-assessed outcome indicators, programme documentation, and open-ended participant feedback. The assessment instrument was developed by the programme team; because item-level responses were not retained, its validity and reliability indices could not be independently established, and analysis was therefore limited to descriptive percentages and percentage-point differences. The compiled summary indicated increases in digital literacy knowledge (58.6% to 87.9%), cyberbullying awareness (44.8% to 84.7%), and reported password protection practices (51.2% to 89.3%), with facilitator-assessed indicators and participant feedback pointing in the same direction. The paper recommends that digital safety education be integrated into routine school counselling practice, that cross-generational and disability-inclusive designs become standard features of community digital literacy programming, and that future iterations retain item-level data to support more rigorous evaluation.