Gender Strategy Advancement International (GSAI) All Creative Hub, a cluster for creatives, is fostering the inclusion and support of creatives with disabilities and women in internal displaced camps in the FCT.
Founder and Executive Director, GSAI, Ada Onyechere Sydney-Jack, disclosed this at the hub’s Women With Words (WOW) event held in commemoration of the annual UN 16 Days Activism Against Gender-Based Violence at the Blake Resort, Abuja.
Contrary to able-bodied creatives, creatives with disabilities and women in IDP camps due to circumstances and absence of facilities and services tailored to meet their needs lack the basics to network, upgrade their skills and earn a living from the arts.
All Creative Hub in collaboration with creative groups such as Performing Music Association of Nigeria (PMAN) FCT, are registering women minorities and different-abled creatives as a performers and performing groups.
Similarly, through it’s blogging platform Under Scriptability GSAI provides women with disabilities room to grow and tell their stories.
“For me it is very deliberate to shape the narratives and voices of persons with disabilities and women minorities especially those in IDP camps. We need to carry them along in this conversation on Gender Based Violence (GBV) because they are community bearers. We need to start shaping our policies around their understanding.
“What WOW seeks to do is to give them a platform where they wax creative, perform and share their ideas on a larger platform.”
Addressing the hub’s purpose, Sydney-Jack said it was created amidst the COVID lockdown as platform of expression from creatives, and a much needed space for women in minorities and persons with disabilities who were major burden bearers owing to their lack of financial empowerment and access to social amenities and dependency on caregivers.
Hence, the creative hub served as an open space offering therapeutic and trauma management of sorts to creatives and women in minorities.
“I think the creative world is a fertile ground for the inclusion of arts and voices. Sustainability is the key here. That is why we have curated them into clusters. Now they are a part of our creative hub, we will ensure they get abilities for their skills.
“This is just the beginning. We will be able to intimate the Ministry of Women Affairs, Culture, Tourism on what we are doing to change the narrative.”
The All Creative Hub WOW, is supported by Voice of Women Empowerment Foundation (VOWEF), MacArthur Foundation and Open Society Africa.
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