‘Nigerian Women, Not Fully Appreciated’

Researcher, Women’s Right Unit, ActionAid Nigeria, Mrs Vanessa Edhebru, has said that Nigerian women will need to be empowered to enable them to seek for their rights and be fully appreciated.

She said this in Abuja in an interview with the press on the activities of the group.

According to her, women groups will need to carry out empowerment programmes to ask for their full rights to be implemented at all times.

Edhebru said that recent findings showed that women worked harder than men but their contributions were not fully recognised.

She said that the research was carried out in two communities, Juwa and Gaube, in the FCT.

According to her, the findings showed that women use most time in child care, house work and farming  work that cannot be calculated into the GDP of the nation.

She also said that the basic objective of the research was to get women’s work to be recognised.

Edhebru appealed to the three tiers of government to provide good water in communities to reduce the burden women went through to fetch water far away from their homes.

“There should be crèches in work and market places to reduce child care stress and create more time for skills acquisition programme,” she said.

She urged women to accept help from the men, saying that the challenge of social construct was difficult to change because “the women do not believe that the men should help them in some areas as they see it as naturally born in them’’.

She said that other stakeholders should get involved and support the Ministry of Women for the development of women.

Edhebru said her organisation was sensitising women in two communities and had developed peer educator training kits useful to women as well as started a literacy programme.

She said her organisation aimed to get more communities involved if it had funding extension in September to allow for more support for the project.