In most Nigeria communities women are mostly relegated to the traditional roles of home keeping in some traditional communities with women and girls getting left overs like can attend school once house chores are completed while their brothers prepare and go to school with the water that their sister walk distance to fetch, cook food, and take care of the home. So that even in farming, women perceived as the weaker once support in planting, food preparations and time for harvest, carry the harvested crops home. There are some communities of women dominance where the women are doing the hard work of farming and at the same time family care, while some men are out there getting drunk of gisting away with friends. Now the time to decide on key decisions, women are absent because they are taking care of family and home. There is the need for deliberate advocacy and action to promote women participation at community level. Somethings we strongly advocate and action upon in communities where we work, but more work needs be done to advance this process.
Violence against women is a huge challenge in Nigeria, there are mindsets that physical abuse on is normal, as some people grew up seeing and knowing that physical abuse is a normal lifestyle. To steam that tide, we need to do more grassroots capacity building and knowledge sharing to make communities realise that physical abuse or any form of abuse is violence and should be discouraged. Also, there is the need to design a people centered case reporting mechanism to ensure incidences are reported through a confidential arrangement. There is the need to train traditional rulers and religious leaders in the areas of GBV and VAWG, since these are the custodians of the traditional laws and religious belief, these leaders are highly respected and revered so that they have greater influence to shape actionable laws and also commit to taking appropriate actions.
Mr. John Ede