By Ken Gbados.
Celebrating International Women’s Day is to celebrate a Women’s Journey through her life, struggles, achievements, and contributions. It is to celebrate her joy, freedom, liberty, and rights. It is to celebrate Womanhood.
Reacting to the above, a foremost rising Nollywood actress; Victoria Nwogu has called on stakeholders to take proactive steps in tackling the persistent barriers against gender quality and recognize the enormous potentials of women as the society is driven by their existence.
In a Media statement on the sidelines of the 2022 International Women’s Day held globally, the prolific actress, entrepreneur, and humanitarian; stated that given their enthusiasm, managerial abilities in building a formidable home and the society at large, women have the potential to contribute immensely to the socio-economic development of a nation.
“A woman is the personification of ageless beauty, selfless love, purity, grace, and dignity. She symbolises virtue, great inner strength, tremendous patience, resilience, and fortitude. The same values she inculcates in everyone around her. She is the pillar of strength to her family Society and the Country as a whole. Women are the backbone of a Nation’s Economy. “There is need therefore to create an enabling environment and opportunities for the socio-economic empowerment of women”, she added.
Continuing, Miss Nwogu frowned at the fact that despite these inherent attributes, women’s empowerment is still a burning issue in the polity. According to her, this is in recognition of the vast number of women with little or no education and skills to enable them to support their livelihoods or become active in the country’s mainstream economy.
“The problem is further exacerbated by the alarmingly high number of our women who are either unemployed or under-employed. Again, those who are successful are being looked at from an immoral point of view. Women are pathfinders and they work assiduously to achieve any feat they set out for”.
While reckoning the contemporary women’s challenges, she informed that women face limited access to credit to capitalize on their micro-informal businesses. “In spite of having brilliant business ideas, the women and girls are sometimes regarded as high-risk clientele group as they do not have the prerequisite collateral.
“They often cannot access project funding from formal financial institutions. This has left the women and girls stuck in the vicious poverty cycle as their businesses remain merely aspirational and micro in nature, providing income for subsistence purposes only.
“Certainly, efforts to design and implement practical programs to generate decent employment, reduce poverty among women and girls and economically empower them to play a more meaningful role in the development and fulfillment of their communities and the nation at large is timely, as it is the catalyst for family and societal values recovery”, she said.
On the one hand, Miss Vicky, who has been upbeat at discovering and encouraging talented female youths in Nigeria and beyond to participate effectively in championing charity campaigns and development in Nigeria through her *Vicky Nwogu Outreach* underscored that women are disappointed with the stewardship of our planet, the unabated violence directed against them and the slow pace of change in fulcrum issues like education.
Asserting that policies are needed that will promote equality in childcare responsibilities and provide State support to families, and those who work in the informal economy, she cited as cause for hope, growing support in tackling gender-bias barriers; a ‘driving will’ for change across generations and counties while adding that the last 27 years “have shown us what is needed to accelerate action for equality.
“We don’t have an equal world at the moment and women and girls are angry and concerned about the future. They are radically impatient for change. It’s an impatience that runs deep, and it has been brewing for years”, Miss Nwogu concluded.
