About 130,000 female business owners have benefited from the Payroll Support component of Nigeria’s Economic Sustainability Programme as the federal government continues to ensure that all government social and entrepreneurial programmes have an affirmative component for women.
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo stated this on Tuesday while declaring open a two-day National Dialogue Forum on girls organized by the Women Arise for Change Initiative in collaboration with African Child Policy Forum ACPF and the Africa Wide Movement for Children AMC in Abuja.
Osinbajo said that the figure represents 43% of the 307,113 employers that have benefited from the programme, which was designed to mitigate income loses in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Prof. Osinbajo, 40, 336 beneficiaries out of 94,000 artisan beneficiaries of the programme are women.
Affirmative action for women
The vice president said that government has also ensured that affirmative action for women were taken in all other social investment and entrepreneurial programmes since 2015, including the Government Enterprise Empowerment Programme GEEP; the Conditional Cash Transfer CCT; the N-Power Programme; and the Home Grown School Feeding Programme.
“So, of the 2.4 million of GEEP, 1.2million were women; that is 56.4% of the beneficiaries. A total of N38 billion in loans have been disbursed over the last four years.
“Of the 1.1 million beneficiaries of the CCT programme, 1.078million of them were women; that is over 98% of beneficiaries.
“In addition, our youth employment programme, the N-Power, we have engaged 526, 000 young people and recently, the president has asked that it be increased to 1million young people.
“Of the 526, 000 of them, 40.4% of them are female. Of the 106,074 cooks in our home-grown school feeding programme, 97% of them are female.
“We also ensure that a minimum 35% of grants to MSMEs go to female owned business,” he said.
Girls initiative for learning
According to Prof. Osinbajo, the Nigerian cabinet approved $500million World Bank credit facility in 2020, to finance adolescent girls initiative for learning and empowerment.
“This is to improve secondary school opportunities among girls in targeted areas of participating states.
“These states include Borno, Ekiti, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi and Plateau.
“The project itself is aimed at creating safe and accessible learning spaces and advancing an enabling environment for girls and strengthening the institutional capacity of federal and state governments to support girls’ education and empowerment.
“The project targeted girls between the ages of 10 to 20 with a strong focus on disadvantaged adolescent girls from poor local government areas with low secondary transition rates from the poorest households. This intervention is projected to benefit at least 6.2million girls and boys,” he added.
Education of children by States and LGs
Vice President Osinbajo challenged states and local governments to live up to their responsibilities in the education of children, since Nigeria’s federal system puts primary schools and the bulk of secondary schools in the hand of those two levels of government.
“While the federal government strives to remain focused and committed to advancing effective approaches to keeping girls safe, and to ensure that girls are given a fair chance, it is important to emphasize that the states and local governments have even more important responsibilities.
“We run a federal system and questions of education and medical care are essentially state matters.
“Primary and secondary schools are in the states and local governments. The federal government has just 100 schools out of the thousands of schools there.
“So, sometimes when we talk about out of school children, and when we talk about problems associated with education, we tend to focus on the federal government whereas the federal government does not run federal schools.
“That is not the business of the federal government. It is the business of state governments and it is business of local governments. And that has to be made clear.”
“Our country is a federal system; states have their own responsibilities, they have governors; they have budgets and their budgets are supposed to reflect the true realities of their concerns in any one of those things.
“All that the federal government does is to show direction and give all the support that it can. So, it is very important that states and local governments to ensure that they implement gender responsive measures that will transform the education system and address the barriers that inhibit girl child education.
“All of these must be done very actively by the states, and we are committed to ensure that this initiative happens,” he said.
The vice president acknowledged the difficulties the girl child faces in Nigeria and encouraged girls in Nigeria to emulate strong role models who were not inhibited by daunting challenges they faced but rose to become successful in life.
National Strategy to end Chuld Marriage
In her opening remarks, the Minister of Women Affairs, Dame Pauline Tallen, said that the Ministry was reviewing the National Strategy to End Child Marriage in Nigeria in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and a coalition of civil society organizations.
“We have scaled up our advocacy on sexual and reproductive health, menstrual hygiene and sanitary products for girls to ensure that girls access such services,” Tallen said.
Delivering the keynote address, the President, Women Arise and host of the dialogue, Dr. Joe Okei-Odumakin said Nigeria has made some progress in improving the state of the girl child, but said that the Nigerian girl child still faced a lot of challenges.
Others who spoke at the dialogue themed: “Towards a girl-friendly Nigeria” were the Executive Director, Africa Child Policy Forum ACPF, Dr. Joan Nyanyuki, from Ethiopia, and a girl-child ambassador, Victoria Solomon, who spoke about being a girl child in Nigeria.
Nneka Ukachukwu
