ECOWAS Women Forum seeks gender equality in commission
By Lizzy Okoji
The ECOWAS Commission Women Forum has called for gender equality and increased women representation across all levels in the commission.
Mrs Raheemat Momodu, President of the ECOWAS Women Forum, made the call at an event organised by the Women’s Forum in commemoration of the 2021 International Women’s Day.
Momodu who lamented women marginalisation in the commission stressed the need for an urgent conduct of gender audit of the entire ECOWAS community institutions.
She said the policy should contain a Strategy and Implementation Practical Guidelines/ Standard Operational Procedure.
“ECOWAS remains mostly a ‘boys club’ in terms of representation especially in management and decision making spaces.
“A quick peep shows that we have three females out of 16 statutory appointees at the Commission (18.75 per cent) and seven female Directors out of 45 directors in all ECOWAS Institutions (15.5 per cent) including two female Special Representatives who are temporary staff.
“This means that we have two female Special Representatives out of 14 (14.2 per cent). And please let no one tell me that representation is only numbers and do not matter.
“Representation matters and counts, if not lets flip the situation. The ECOWAS commission should lead by example to the member states, so as to be in the position to insist the member states comply with the beautiful ECOWAS Gender Equality we have developed.
“46 years after the birth of ECOWAS and its principal institutions, it do not have a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy and Gender Equality goals/targets for internal purposes.
“It is time that we conduct a gender audit of the entire ECOWAS community institutions to inform a transformative Gender Mainstreaming Policy which will contain a Strategy and Implementation Practical Guidelines/ Standard Operational Procedures,” she said.
Speaking on the forum’s contributions to the society during the COVID-19 pandemic, Momodu said that ECOWAS Women Forum provided relief to less privileged communities in the Federal Capital Territory to ameliorate their sufferings.
She added that the forum empowered women in Kpaduma Community near Asokoro, Abuja, to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Momodu said the forum had lined up other activities for 2021 which included capacity building activities, investment opportunities and multiple streams of income in a COVID-19 world.
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