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WARDC trains stakeholders to enhance skills, monitoring Nigeria’s SDGs

By Ijeoma Thomas-Odia
01 April 2021   |   2:00 am
Civil Society Organisations and Women rights groups have been tasked to enhance their skills to monitor and assess Nigeria’s progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Benchmarks.

Founding Director of WARDC, Dr. Abiola Afolabi-Akiyode

Civil Society Organisations and Women rights groups have been tasked to enhance their skills to monitor and assess Nigeria’s progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Benchmarks. This is as it relates to Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV), Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) and Harmful Practices (HP).

At a One-Day Training on monitoring and assessment of Nigeria’s progress towards institutional SDGs benchmarks organised by Women Advocate Research and Documentation Centre, (WARDC) in partnership with the EU-UN Spotlight Initiative, held in Lagos.

According to the founding director, WARDC, Dr. Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi the goal is to strengthen CSOs in tackling all forms of discrimination, build capacity to demand accountability on VAWG/SGBV/HP/SRHR and push for reforms that would eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and girls. This will further ensure we have a society where women can live a violence-free life.

The facilitator at the training and Board member, Lagos State Health Management Agency, Ayo Adebusoye said, “SDGs has a 2030 deadline, we have nine more years to achieve this goal, unless there is a radical change we cannot attain the goal. The women are restrained and so we need to educate them that they really have to come together and make sure they play their part at the local level in this development.

“Poverty and low access to education is one of the issues duly accepted in Nigeria as we see that women are being kept out of school especially with the spate of insecurity, women are largely underrepresented in the government, and so bringing these women together to understand these factors are important to achieving the SDGs.”

Adebusoye added that nation’s budget should be made open and transparent so that policy makers can be held accountable. “One of the things we came up today is about monitoring the local government budget, we are not just talking about projects and budgets we are talking about money, and if public leaders don’t have access to information which should be of public knowledge, that shows the challenge we deal with. We need to open up the budget and make it transparent so that policy makers can be held accountable.”

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