A call has gone to the federal government to as a matter of necessity mainstream gender justice and equality into governance to enhance social inclusion.
A coalition of Civil Society Organisations who made the call on Monday, gave the charge at the VOICE Nigeria Gender Justice Community of Practice workshop with the theme “Breaking Gender Bias”.
The Facilitator Voice Community of Practice for Gender Justice in Nigeria, Mrs Rosemary Adejoh-Adaji, called on the federal government to ensure gender and social inclusion at all levels of governance.
According to her, there should be a deliberate effort to ensure gender mainstreaming across all strata of the society.
She said the gathering of the 10 civil society organisations at the workshop aim to enhance collaboration, networking and sharing among the community of gender justice and building capacity of members in terms of gender related programming as regards women, girls and issues around violence.
Delivering a keynote address, the Programme Manager Gender Justice at Oxfam Nigeria, Ms Helen Akinyemi, said gender mainstreaming was a perfect step towards an inclusive society.
Akinyemi who is also a gender advisor noted further that there can never be a sustainable development without gender equality and justice.
She identified lack of access to gender data in Nigeria as a barrier to gender justice.
She stated that inadequate knowledge or misconception of gender was another barrier to gender justice in Nigeria.
“What gender represents is not just fighting the other person like women fighting the men. No. It is about bringing an inclusive society and it is impossible for us to have sustainable development when there is gender inequality.so it’s about the people understanding these facts and working towards it and it is not about relinquishing some certain people’s power but about helping the disadvantaged groups in the society.
“The purpose of us being here is to have an inclusive society. It is also about gender mainstreaming which is one of the steps towards achieving the expected goal of an inclusive society.
It’s about bridging those gaps. I talked about data,we have institutions that work on data gathering on gender,why not mainstream into what they do so that whenever data is being collected,it is also being analysed in gender perspective”.
“We also have so many policies that speak to this and so many policies are being developed but let us work more towards implementation of those policies”.
In her remarks,the Executive Director COGNITO, Ms Christiana Asala called for the protection of gender rights and the balance of gender in governments and organisations.
“The Gender Justice Community of Practice is basically bringing in different organisations to share their learnings on gender justice and learn from each other and device a way in which they can grow together basically mainstream gender in the different aspects they work both programmes,policies and even in their organisation’s so we are hoping that at the end of today, we’ll be able to bring our different experiences, expertise and share together and learn from each other”.
She said “we want to fight to make sure all genders are being protected and catered for in our organisations so that at the end of the day everyone is carried along in the principle of leaving no one behind to make nothing about us without us.
” If you are going to plan for us, then we have to be represented both at the organisation, community level and at every phase of life”.
She commended the current representation of women in government and called for more to balance the gap.
“On gender inclusivity,we are getting there,it is not as bad as it used to be ,right now we have more female representation in most arms of government but we are definitely not there yet but we are basically advocating that gender is more mainstreamed at government level even at the organisational level.
We must make sure every gender is equally represented at every point in time”.