Ene Oshaba
Women’s Aid Collective (WACOL); a human rights of women and young people based organization has called on the federal government to be more committed to implementing the international obligations it is signatory to, especially in reporting to the CEDAW committee and ensuring that relevant treaty bodies that has to deal with women and children are timely done.
Its Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Prof. Joy Ezeilo(OON SAN), also urged that the government follow through with recommendations as it is very important in order to enable the elimination of all forms of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in the country.
Prof. Ezeilo made the call in Abuja while feilding questions from the media at a one-day refresher training for selected Civil Society Organisations (CSO’s) on Shadow Reporting/Treaty Monitoring and Human Rights Standards issues for Women Rights Defenders on VAW/HP and SRHR, it organized with the support from UN Women spotlight initiative project.
Ezeilo lauded the progress by the government so far, especially by declaring a state of emergency on Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) during the Covid-19 pandemic, she however stressed the need for government to budget more for gender issues and institutional mechanisms that can support women who are majorly victims of violence.
“There has been development progress made by governments like in the declaration of state of emergency on sexual and gender based violence during the Covid-19 and we have seen that covid threw up a number of issues with regards to violence against women.
“The Covid-19 period showed that there is a spike in GBV and so women want really good national referral mechanism and healthcare facilities where they can get free medicals if they have victims, or survivors of gender based violence and that’s why we’re asking that the government provide facilities, institutional mechanism that can support women in this.
“Of course the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking In Persons (NAPTIP) is implementing the issues of Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act but the problem is sometimes they don’t have enough resources,” she regretted.
“We’re advocating that resources should go into women’s work, children, especially girl children because it costs money, even violence against women, has economic implications. Government need to understand that and do more gender budgeting,” she stressed.
The Founder explained that the refresher training aims at promoting accountability to gender equality and women’s human rights, lamenting that Nigeria has many laws but implementation has remained a challenge.
She therefore tasked participants at the training to continuously demand accountability and monitor government reports in order to ensure greater accountability to gender equality in the country.
Earlier, CEDAW Expert/WADHI Esther Eghobamien Mshelia, stressed the benefits of a Shadow report to the ensuring the implementation of obligations of State parties to protecting the human rights of all citizens whether they are male, female, boys, girls, menso their rights should be protected for Fantastic.
There are many opportunities because governments has demonstrated its willingness the CSO’s need to engage appropriately with government and work with them to enquire about reports and offer to help because there may be green areas that government may not be aware and help shape policies and join the global community to hold the conventions and all the rights of people high.
Meanwhile, one of the participants who is a Lawyer/Media and CEO of My Take Initiative Dr. Rosemary Chikwendu, stressed the need for countries to report from time to time how far they have giveone with the implementation of treaties especially on CEDAW which demands reporting every four years.
“The CSO’s has the responsibility to send in Shadow reports as an addendum to the report sent by the government to checkmate the give and bring it to accountability, ” she explained.