By Chukwuemeka Okereafor

NAIJA Magazine Online (NMO) publisher, Chukwuemeka Okereafor had a chat with the Honourable Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Senator Aisha Jummai Alhassan, at the sidelines of the ongoing UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She talked about the essence of the CSW, federal government’s plans to enhance girl-child education and what women must do to move forward.

Essence of the UN CSW

We are at the CSW61 to report progress we have made from the last conclusions. Conclusions are suggestions for women empowerment to boost gender equality and women empowerment to make life better for women and children generally.

We conclude every time on new ways of achieving women empowerment. When we go back, we implement what we have learnt, we implement the conclusions, and then we come back the following year to report progress and then look at things that didn’t work from the last conclusions. We then make amends, pick or learn new things elsewhere, not necessarily in CSW and then share with the rest of the member states and we take back.

From what I am seeing, we are learning so many new things that we will take back home, try to implement and see how best we can better the lives of women and children in Nigeria.

Plans to eradicate ‘female illiteracy’?

We intend to do that by, not only encouraging putting more efforts in girl-child education, but also stopping things that hinder the progress of the education of girls especially; things like early child marriage.

The Federal Government Investment Programme of conditional cash transfer and other items on the Social Investment Programme will bring people out of poverty. Mostly, people stop their children, or don’t take their children to school because of poverty. If government introduces programmes that will bring people or uplift them out of poverty, there is likelihood that their children will go to school.

The School Feeding Programme also helps to enroll and keep children in school. These ways, girl-child education will be boosted in Nigeria. We are hopeful.

School Feeding Programme vs Complete Free Education

It is not possible at this time to have education completely free. When things were better for Nigeria, we had that. As things got tougher and the population grew, it became impossible to have everything (education) free for everybody. The government will love to do that but it’s just impossible, we must face realities of where we are and what we are going through now.

Education is highly subsidized in Nigeria. Even if education is free, it is still difficult to enroll children if they are hungry. If they go to school for free, they still have to go home to eat. This is why parents keep them out of school to hawk or do one thing or the other to get money to feed the family, to feed the children.

If there is a school feeding programme and parents are sure that their children will get something to eat during the day, parents will send their children there and the children will remain there and look forward to eating before going home. This is why the school feeding programme is good.

Also, women are empowered by the school feeding programme. It is the women that are engaged as the cooks and food vendors, so you see job creation for women who are sitting and doing nothing.

In the rural areas also, most farmers are women. The school feeding programme is home grown, it is food that is grown around the area the school is situated (that will be used to feed the school children). Therefore the people there, the women farmers will have their produce bought for the schools’ feeding without the farmers having to go anywhere (to sell their produce).

The federal government social investment programme is really targeted towards women. Also, the conditional cash transfer, the money is given to the caregiver of the family: women. The social investment programme is designed for women and the youths.

Final words

As Nigerian women, we should believe in ourselves, we should believe that we can work together, we can do our best to bring ourselves out of poverty, to empower ourselves, to bring ourselves on board in areas of governance, like politics.

We can better the economy. The largest percentage of people in the informal economy are women, so we should believe in ourselves to help our children and our families.

Culled from Naija Magazine Online

For more on the ongoing CSW61, please visit www.naijamagazineonline.com

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Maryam Abacha
AishaHaliburton
Patience Jonathan
Stella Obasanjo
Diezanni Madueke
Turai Yar'adua
Remi Tinubu

Hope these women are not the women u are referring to

on what basis exactly,women that can not manage peace in the family are here making noise.if woman should rule this country every crime go be death penalty trust me.

woman that can not be under her husband is that one wife material?