The Nigerian Women Trust Fund (NWTF) has made grooming of young women leaders top priority. ENE OSANG writes on the “Young Women Leaders Essay Competition” it organised with support from the National Endowment of Democracy (NED) in Abuja.
Following the unending leadership challenge in the country, the NWTF engaged in series of programmes meant to instill leadership qualities in younger women.
Recently, an essay competition was organised to ascertain young women understanding of leadership, their ambition concerning governance, and steps they are making towards achieving their dreams of becoming a leader.
Chief Executive Offi cer (CEO) of the fund Olufunke Baruwa, while briefi ng the press at the Shehu Musa YarAdua centre in Abuja said “Th e Young Women Leaders Essay Competion” is to further encourage young women to gain leadership knowledge.
Baruwa said it is disheartening that the few women in decision making positions in the country today are “grandmothers”.
To this end she said the Young Women Leaders project include trainings on leadership skills, communication, ublic speaking, organising skills, community mobilization for legislatorconstituency engagements, learning visits to the parliament and other strategic participation in leadership programmes.
According to her, “Nigeria is at a critical stage and this is not the time to take baby steps, we need to be ready to take the future and grooming young women to take leadership positions is what the young women’s project is all about.
She emphasised that women must not wait until they are called to lead before they can do so, noting that those who got leadership positions on a platter of gold most times don’t handle such positions as expected of them.
“Take a look at the National Assembly and key parastatals, the few women we have there are grand mothers and it is as if you must wait until you are 50 or 60 before you get into any decision making position whether in the public or private sector, you won’t fi nd any body below thirty who is high up there and we thought that this was bad.
“If the people we have in decision making now retire or they get tired or they die what will happen, how are we preparing the next generation to step into there shoes? “Leadership is not foisted on anyone, those who have leadership foisted on them usually don’t do well, they fumble a lot along the way and they don’t have a second chance to right all their wrongs,” she said.
Explaining the criteria for selecting the girls under their mentorship she said, “For this phase, we selected students from Bida Polytechnic and Bingham university.
Th e next phase which has started already is Kogi and Abia state and we will keep taking one or two institutions from each state.
“ This is not the only grooming process, we also have our mentorship programme which is widely publicised and young women can apply.
Each of these girls are either in the mentorship programme, our twitter conferences, a number of them will work with us on the my bold steps while some of them will come into our office as interns and some of them are already getting jobs with our connections and some God willing will go on exchange programmes we will keep engaging with the young women.
” Responding to the argument that the women’s struggle is a feminist propaganda she said, “I think everyone should be a feminist.
” “You might have your variations or arguments for that but feminism means the right to say women too are human.
We probably won’t need a feminist agenda if everyone has equal opportunities to thrive not like the style of eagle fl ying on one wing as Nigeria do,” she emphasised.
Earlier, the Programmes Coordinator of the fund Mr. Anthony Abu, maintained that patriarchal system practised in Nigeria has battered women’s self esteem so much that some women stay away from politics.
“We don’t want this to happen in 2019 that is why we introduced the #MyBoldSteps campaign to encourage every woman to take that bold step out in informing their communities on why women should be in leadership position.
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