Group Pushes For Gender Equity, Social Justice For Women, Girls

An organisation working to advance gender equity and justice in health, education and economic opportunity for women, Rise Up Nigeria, is training civil society organisations (CSOs) on advocacy and leadership skills.

The training aims to help leaders strengthen their organisations, lead change in their communities, and advance national and local-level impact for women, and girls.

Rise Up Nigeria country director, Theresa Effa, said the 24 CSOs leaders selected for the training were drawn from Rivers, Anambra, Nasarawa, Kaduna states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) respectively.

She said the training will support the CSOs to identify the main issues around gender inequality and engage decision makers at various levels to bridge the existing gaps.

“Despite the challenges we face in Nigeria to achieve gender equity, I am hopeful that the more NGO leaders that are engaged in policy advocacy, the more systemic changes we will see at all levels.

“Rise Up’s Advocacy and Leadership Accelerator training will strengthen the skills of these 24 emerging leaders and support their organisations to identify the root cause of gender inequalities and how best to engage decision makers at various levels to institute laws, policies, programmes, and community norms that promote systemic change for Nigerian women and girls,” said  Effa.

She said following the Rise Up training, leaders will have the opportunity to apply for competitive grant funding to launch their advocacy strategies to advance economic opportunity and social justice for women and girls at the community level and nationally across the country.

“This new group of leaders join Rise Up’s powerful global network of more than 800 Leaders in 17 countries,” she added.

Effa explained that “Rise Up has been working in Nigeria since 2014 and we have been supporting CSOs to undertake efforts that would contribute to the development of women and girls within Nigeria and in several communities.

“Incidentally this year International Women Day (IWD) falls within our 6-day intensive training, we thought we should use this medium to join our voices to call on the government to continue to bridge the inequality gap that exists in the country.

“The 35 per cent affirmative action is an international agreement that Nigeria signed into, the government should not look at independent errors or alteration of the women in the country.

“The affirmative action is what we signed to  keep in Nigeria  but we are not there yet,  though we made some progress up to 2011, we have witnessed a down turn as date 2023  shows that only about 7 percent  of women are in elective/appointive position as against 37 percent of their male counterparts.”

One of the participants, Mrs Esohe Ekunwe, appreciated the organiser for putting the training together, saying, “It has been a special moment, really enlightened leaders are here, we agree that all of the things we have learnt, we can use that to stand on our own and do things right.”