The need for government at all levels in Nigeria to implement policies that will positively affect the lives of women and girls has again been emphasized.
Stakeholders say government must intensify efforts in implementing policies that will provide women and girls opportunity and access to education in order to realise their full potentials and contribute to national development.
Education is a basic human right and has been recognized as such since the 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. So also is health.
Currently Nigerian women are making many advancements within their society. In recent years, three male dominated professions, the Nigerian Medical Association, the Nigerian Bar Association and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, have been led by female presidents
To further advance the cause of women and girls in the country, stakeholders are calling on the government to address the problem of poor policy implementation which had been described as a major factor preventing women from reaching their goals.
Hence, they are building capacity of leaders of civil society organisations on advocacy so as to positively engage policy makers and leaders to commit to promoting and implementing policies that will bring about women empowerment and gender equality.
Just last week, some of the organisations pushing for social justice for girls and women in Nigeria, Rise Up in collaboration with Cummins Incorporated urged the government to implement women-friendly policies that touch on all the issues affecting women in the country.
According to them, “Nigeria has beautiful policies that are capable of addressing significant obstacles facing girls and women in reaching their full potentials, only that implementation has remained a major challenge”.
In the views of the programme manager for Rise Up, Africa, Chantal Hildebrand, “As we see from global data when women are in a leadership position, there is gender equity within government, the country is better, stronger, healthier, happier and have better opportunities.
” It is more than ensuring that women are somewhere, we don’t want women in talking places, we want to ensure that women are actively being able to be part of the decision and their inputs are taken into account at the same level as their men.”
She said as Nigeria prepares for election come next year, there is a need for Nigerian women to learn about their candidates, ask them their plans for women and girls, hold them to account and ensure there are strategies in place to protect women and
girls.
She explained that the leadership training organised by Rise Up for civil society leaders was to prepare them to see the value of women in decision making as well as advocate for them.
“We have only selected 20 leaders from Kaduna and Lagos for this phase; they will be spreading this information and training more people. Sometimes you know pass 10-20 humans and then continuing to do the work in their own organisations,” she noted.
Also speaking, the Country Director of Rise Up Nigeria, Mrs Theresa Effa said: “Nigeria has beautiful policies that touch on all the issues we are talking about but the implementation is the major challenge. That is why we need to continue the advocacy to remind government to pay more attention to issues affecting women and
girls. ”
Effa explained that Rise Up was focused on advancing health, development and gender amongst women and girls and work most especially with civil society leaders to strengthen their leadership and advocacy skills in order for them to undertake advocacy efforts that would improve the lives of women and girls in Nigeria.
On the impact of the programme, she explained that the trained leaders have been groomed to ask strategic questions from Nigerian leaders on what they will do in terms of advancing social justice for women and
girls.
“Rise Up has trained more than 200 people in Nigeria, but for this particular gender equity project that we initiated in April this year, we have trained 40 people”, she added.
On the part of the Managing Director of Cummins West Africa Limited, Ade Obatoyinbo, the mission of the two organisations was centred on making peoples’ lives better by empowering a more prosperous
world.
