‘Poverty cannot be eradicated without women’

What poverty eradication programmes are you carrying out for women and children in the country?There are several things we have done in the past and looking at the concept of women empowerment, right now our major focus is economic empowerment of women. Because we know that if the women get empowered or there are policies […]

What poverty eradication programmes are you carrying out for women and children in the country?
There are several things we have done in the past and looking at the concept of women empowerment, right now our major focus is economic empowerment of women. Because we know that if the women get empowered or there are policies that empower women to become independent, more functional they will contribute significantly to poverty eradication. We all know more than 60 percent of the poorest people are women and if you target them you are basically targeting the key sector of the poor.
And for that reason last year we did a ‘Do Agric’ campaign where we tried to call attention to increased investment in the agriculture sector particularly with focus on women small scale farmers.
The idea is to give them the tools and incentives to be much more productive, give them right to land and rights to inputs among others. So that when they have access to basic agricultural inputs, they can produce more, be more empowered and have more income for themselves and take care of their children and their homes.
We have done this in the past but most particularly this year working with the African Union ‘Year of women empowerment’ we are seriously involved in mobilizing voices all over the world to say women should be the centre of all global development agenda. For us this is very critical because we have a report that ‘Poverty is sexist in’ Nigeria we call it the ‘feminization of poverty.’
If you compare women in developing countries with women in developed countries we see the kind of variation in terms of access to justice, inputs and other fundamental things that will guarantee them their freedom and independence.
The difference is really so much so right now we are saying focus on women if you really want to develop globally.
In terms of health, we have campaigned heavily on maternal health, prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV and how to increase access to vaccines and drugs. Basically all these things that are targeted at poverty as a whole and  specifically  on women. We have been campaigning on these issues for the past 10 years.

Several women in this country have problems accessing loans for agricultural production, how has one campaign intervened in this area?
We put a lot of information out there and advocated to governments that women’s access to finance is very minimal compared to their male counterparts. We have always advocated that government should increase the funding base for the agricultural sector.
And then create fewer hurdles for women farmers to access these loans. We tried to call attention to the fact that if there is public investment in agriculture and it is not targeted at giving preferential access to women in terms of finances, there is very limited growth we can experience.
We have advocated over and over that there should be increased public investment in agriculture particularly in relation to the Maputo commitment which says 10 percent of the national budget should be to the agric sector.
But we did not stop at that, we said even if you are increasing these investments, you should target specifically increased access to finance which could be micro loans targeted at women. We have raised these issues even at the AU level.
We participated in the AU Malabo summit in July last year and ensured that the commitment that came for the AU summit specifically made reference to preferential access for women and youth.
We are also tracking till date how open or how easy it has been for women and youth to get access to the agricultural sector and work within the sector. So those are some of the things we have done.
 
In this year of women empowerment, what  has One Campaign specifically outlined for women in Nigeria?
One Campaign started with some initiatives this year. We started the Action 2015 campaign in January and collaborated with several NGOs to launch it.
 In the campaign we basically talked about the fact that gender and poverty disparity indices in Nigeria show that if the women are not given specific attention it will be difficult to say we are eradicating poverty.
So part of the things we tried to do is to call attention to the fact that women are disproportionately affected by poverty and we launched the report called ‘Poverty is sexist’ in March this year and it is spreading all over the world.
And we have major voices around the world that joined the campaign like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, among others including our own Genevieve Nnaji  here to increase and amplify the voice to say you cannot ignore women and say you are tackling poverty.
We are putting that at the forefront and right now we are planning to do a policy forum  next week where we will bring these issues to the fore particularly to the new government that is coming in.
So you cannot say you are planning to eradicate poverty without putting women at the centre of these kinds of plan. This year we call the campaign ‘poverty is sexist but we can do it’.
Basically we can eradicate poverty by drawing attention to women in a specific way.  Also this year the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will end and if they end what kind of goals are we expecting to replace the MDGs?
At the global level there is a sustainable development goal that is coming up.  What One Campaign is doing is to ensure that even at the global level women still remain the centre of the global development goals, in every way it affects women, in every of the indicators and things that will be measured, we want to see how it specifically affects women. So it is a proactive step to call world leaders particularly in Nigeria and Africa to say put women at the centre of development even at the global level.

Is there any specific policy framework you want implemented in the country?
We know there is a lot of talk around the affirmative action implementation,  gender policy and girl child education, early marriage and all these issues that have been at the front burner of  debates in the country are all our concern.
We have talked about the fact that education should be made compulsory for all girls in the country.  How the gender policy affects education and the girl child and increase the enrollment and retention rate  of the girl child.
We are also concerned about the health policies in the way it specifically targets women to ensure that less of these women die from child birth. We are concerned with every policy that looks at every social aspects of the women’s life in Nigeria.
So we are now saying enough of talking about policy it is now time for action and that there should be enough funding for these policies to be implemented. Our ideas right now is to begin to track to what extent these policies have led to increased welfare for the womenfolk in Nigeria. We are going to work with the Ministry of Agriculture  to see what number of females have entered into the sector, how many they are now and how they are improving.
So the point for us now is enough of policy ‘talk –talk’ to policy ‘walk-walk’ and the new government  for us should take proactive steps so that existing policies do not end up on the shelves and political campaigns  but should end up with concrete actions and  results.
This year we will be calling a lot of attention to women and our idea is that the woman wherever she is whether in the village or city is passing through major stress and the earlier we realize this the better for us. This is what captured our essence to say they should be given more attention because attention to the women is attention to development.