Empower Women, Say Goodbye to Poverty

from All Africa

This Day (Lagos)

By Mary Ekah
Lagos

The programme organised by Development Support Institute (DSI) in partnership with Esso/Exxon-Mobil at the Banquet Hall, Wellington Hotel, Warri, Delta State, was intended to equip the women in the rural area with basic skills so that they would be empowered to play major roles in the economic arena and contribute more meaningfully in the finance of their immediate family.

At the opening ceremony of the programme, the Executive Director, DSI, Mrs. Jacqueline Odiadi said, "With skills, women can set personal economic goals for themselves, have more respect and feel better fulfilled as human beings in the larger society".

Women, Odiadi said, constitute the very bedrock of the family and a woman who earns her keep, she added, can by far help bring up the children with all the additional support of the husband and men folk in general. DSI, she stressed, realizes all these and so has always made skills acquisition for women as one of its core objectives. Usually on its own and at times in partnership with donor groups, DSI has been able to deliver several services to women.

"We collaborate with a broad range of organizations foreign and local for this purpose", Odiadi noted. With the assistance of the German government, DSI was able to donate a borehole to women in the Berekodo Community, Eleko, Ibeju-Lekki, Local Government, in Lagos State very recently.

The borehole project commissioned at Berekodo community was conceived by DSI after a needs assessment of the community and was graciously funded by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Nigeria.

Odiadi said that when DSI paid the initial visits to the Berekodo Community, it observed that the women and children were busy fetching water from two shallow wells, which were the only source of water in the community. As a gender oriented organisation, Odiadi noted that the experience served as a catalyst to persuade the partners, the German Government, to provide the women and children in the community their very first pipe-borne water.

This she will contribute to healthier living of the Berekodo community, by providing the community with clean water to drink, cook, clean and wash.

Expressing her gratitude to Esso/Exxon Mobil for partnering with DSI in the Niger/Delta programme, Odiadi said that the skills set down for the two-week programme were milliner- hat and bead making; tie and dye cloth making - local fabric (adire); fish farming - small scale ponds; snail and grass cutter farming; cassava processing and soap making. In addition to all these, she said there would be talk on basic entrepreneurial skills as well as reproductive health matters for the participants.

To encourage the participants to be on their own after the training, starter packs were provided at the end of the programme. To also demonstrate how seriously DSI viewed this skill acquisition programme, DSI intends to carry out post-training evaluation at the end to see how the participants are fairing and also conduct a furthers needs assessment on them.

Also last year in Lagos, DSI had a widely publicised two-day workshop on peace building in the Niger Delta region in partnership with Shell Petroleum Development Co. One of the key areas of agreement by nearly all the discussants at the event centred on the need to reduce the vulnerability of women to violent disruptions by making them viable as catalysts and players in the economic process. With basic skills as earlier mentioned, DSI believes that most people will see immediately which part of the economy they can function as goods or service providers.

Odiadi's advise for the Niger-Delta women, was that every one of them should take full advantage of the opportunity provided by the training programme as well as make best of it.

Delivering her address at the occasion, First Lady, Delta State, Mrs. Sheila Roli Uduaghan who was special guest, said that a major difference between the developed and rich nations of the world and their poor and developing counterparts is the extent and level to which women are empowered.

She noted that the United Nations Organization (UNO) report indicates that developing countries are much likely to bridge the gap if women are empowered and made partners of development in all spheres of national life.

"In Sub-Saharan African, the role of women in nation building is far from what is expected. This has been attributed to gender inequality and poverty. It is no longer news that poverty in Sub-Saharan African is colossal and has been recognized as the bane of economic, social and political advancement", she said.

She stressed that it was disheartening to note that the most vulnerable group to the impact of poverty is the woman folk whose access to education, employment, technology and decision-making has been curtailed by gender inequality in a male chauvinist driven world.

Consequently, Uduaghan said majority of women in Sub-Saharan Africa have been reduced to mere paupers and beggars whose livelihood must depend on the "crumbs that falls from the table of the their male counterparts".

She therefore noted that poverty reduction through women empowerment has been prioritized as a major cardinal point of her husband, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, the governor of Delta State.