We are committed to sustaining lives – UNFPA

How is the UNFPA operating in Nigeria, and what services is it providing?At the UNFPA, we work by supporting government to do the business of government. Every five years, each country evolves a country programme, this is basically what the government wants. In implementing the country programme, government allows other entities to participate. The states […]

How is the UNFPA operating in Nigeria, and what services is it providing?
At the UNFPA, we work by supporting government to do the business of government. Every five years, each country evolves a country programme, this is basically what the government wants. In implementing the country programme, government allows other entities to participate. The states benefit from technical assistance, but the programmes they do are owned by them.
Many people worry that children of these communities have their education disrupted, which may have great impact in the future. Where do you come in?
Yes, with the insurgency, we’ve had to do some work in the North-east. That includes building the capacity of government and civilians to address the issues of communities. Women and girls are the target of our work, but it goes beyond them. Communities have suffered tremendously, many have been totally vanquished. We work with communities to enable them revive themselves and with the return of various members, ensure that the community is ready to accept them and reintegrate them.
When you look at the girls and boys, many of them have been denied access to school. We work with other agencies and CSO partners to ensure we can get them back to school.
In the course of this insurgency many women and girls have been sexually violated, and have had to be counseled and provided with support. We take the view that if they are pregnant we will ensure we provide them services through government and their CSOs to help carry the pregnancies properly.
One thing Nigerians don’t talk often about is that the greatest cause of maternal mortality in Nigeria happens among young girls. Young girls that die in pregnancy constitute maybe 30% to 40% of the large burden of maternal mortality. We need to provide them with support and counseling so that they can carry through the pregnancy.
We do not advocate for abortions or sterilizations as has been carried in the Nigerian press. We support life, we support them to make their decisions of carrying their pregnancies through.
I’m not sure if anyone of us has gone through that harrowing experience – to be denied access to your loved ones and in a sense that you don’t even know when or if you are going to come back. What we are dealing with is a very serious issue of destruction of the confidence of a person. For the woman, because she has to have her dignity maintained on a monthly basis, we provide dignity kits.
In the circumstance of Nigeria, we also added clothes, because they didn’t have clothing, and in Somalia we added dates, because they didn’t have food to eat.
There are those who might have been raped but are not pregnant. Gender based violence is not something anyone of us wants to go through. The destruction of the psyche, the very sense of the person is taken away. For most of them, they see flashes of this man or these several men who have defiled them and we need to work with them to bring them back as much as possible to their normality. We do this through psychosocial support.
We work with IDPs to ensure they can protect themselves. Gender based violence is a global problem. One in three women will be violated in their life. In violence, conflicts and disasters, that goes up considerably. We have to ensure we work with them so that they can learn to protect themselves. We do that in addition to providing safe spaces for them within the camp, so they can avoid circumstances where they might be vulnerable.
What would you say are the greatest challenges for women and children in this period of insurgency?
Firstly, security: In looking after these circumstances, our staff on the ground would have to feel secure. I’m glad the government of Nigeria is collaborating with other governments to make the North-east safe. Secondly, resources are not as adequate as you want them to be. The UN is not a rich organisation but we make sure we reach out to the very vulnerable and look after them, but we could do more with more resources.
In my life I haven’t seen camps in Nigeria. It is sad it got to the point where we had to establish camps. We’ve had disasters, and women, men and girls affected go into homes of cousins and aunts and they are looked after by the community.
But this has been overwhelming to the point where communities have been totally eliminated, and people have come back without homes they can go into, and they now have to go into camps. That is something we have to deal seriously with.
The average life of a camp in the world is 17 years. What tends to happen is when there is a disaster and people establish camps, the international community and national governments respond, and they give money. They start to look after them. But after some time, something else comes up. They are on their own and struggling, but they are still in the camp. Dadaab camp in northern Kenya has been there for 30 years from Somalia, and they are struggling to go and resettle them. I’m hoping the issue of camps and IDPs in Nigeria will be a temporary thing and that people, government and all who work with them would assist to resettle them and have their lives back.
Can you evaluate the impact of what you are doing?
If you have a cut in your skin and it heals, it cannot be like what it was before. If you are displaced from your home and in a camp, no matter what someone brings to you in camp, it cannot be like your home. Red Cross has appealed for $60 million. I’m sure that’s just an estimate. When you start to work,  what you would require is far more than you think it is. I agree we need to put more money there. But I think the ultimate thing is to restore normalcy to the North-east, so people can go back to their lives.
Food insecurity is not because we can’t cultivate, it is because we are  too afraid to cultivate. If we restore normalcy, people can go back to their lives, farmers go back to their farms and work.