. . . Kicks off ‘What Women Can Do’ governance inclusive competition

By YEJIDE GBENGA-OGUNDARE

The Akin Fadeyi Foundation (AFF), Nigeria’s foremost public accountability non-profit organisation, is set to launch “What Women Can Do” competition; a project that is expected to prise open the vast untapped potentials of women as very significant social actors in Nigeria and stimulate a gender inclusive leadership conversation across the cyberspace.

The event will kick-off with a pre-event media conversation and convergence on July 19, 2022, at 11am and it will feature media and public policy actors and practitioners, including feature editors of newspapers and online news platforms, alongside women leaders and other distinguished participants.

Speaking on the project, the Executive Director, Akin Fadeyi, said: “This gathering will speak to and unearth the huge possibilities that remain unleashed in the country with the loud absence of the participation of women in the public space especially after the just concluded party primaries. It is also an affirmation of the Gender Equality and Social Inclusion programme thrust of our Funders, the MacAuthur Foundation.

“What Women Can Do project will speak to how leadership would be a lot more impactful when women are empowered to act as equal stakeholders in national development. The ultimate objective of this programme will be to encourage women to endure in their leadership ambitions despite the present turns in Nigerian politics, to re-affirm their capabilities as equally endowed social actors who are not intellectually subordinate in any way, and to stimulate public conversation on the need for gender parity in the access to power.

“The Akin Fadeyi Foundation is motivated by the understanding that while Nigeria has never been in lack of high quality women who can play major progressive roles in politics, a number of the factors have skewed the system against women from earlier times. These not only include pervasive norms and cultural beliefs that emphasis the subordinate position and roles of women in society,” Akin Fadeyi emphasised.

He added that the AFF is poised to sponsor a competition amongst the female folk, where they would speak to their competences and what they are capable of doing and will do different when they take on the reins of leadership and occupy impactful positions of public decision-making.

“More recently, this has been buttressed by the patriarchal configuration of institutions and systems that have set up unreasonable standards that delimit the access and participation of women in the consequential public space. This was more recently evident in the influence of money on our political process, making it difficult for women to get involved without serious sponsors, which is certainly hard to come by as an altruistic proposition,” he explained.

According to him, out of the competitors who will make leadership pitches and speak to any topic of interest from agriculture to education, healthcare, power generation, science and innovation, ten finalists will be selected.

The top five finalists will be rewarded with different gifts on basis of the strength, innovation, uniqueness and acceptability of their pitches while the other set of five finalists will be given consolation prizes.

Also, the Akin Fadeyi Foundation (AFF) is prepared to deepen its work on political and social accountability, as it gets ready to deploy its FlagIt app for election observation, monitoring and reporting.

“As the Nigerian general elections are just around the corner and some of the persistent concerns of citizens remain issues pertaining to the freeness and fairness of the polls, particularly with the potential participation of a huge youth and digitally savvy demographic, the app is set to offer a very critical tool for evidence gathering, while monitoring and observing, and for documentation to assist in election and post-election accountability,” he concluded.

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