NCDMB calls for more women in leadership roles in Nigeria’s energy industry

The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) says more women should hold leadership positions in the country’s energy industry.

Simbi Wabote, executive secretary of NCDMB, made the call recently during a business training session, according to a statement by the agency’s corporate communications department.

The training targets 30 women chief executives who are undergoing a six-day entrepreneurship training workshop sponsored by the NCDMB in Port Harcourt, Rivers state.

The workshop is tagged ‘entrepreneurship development training for women business leaders and entrepreneurs’.

In his speech, Wabote said the number of women entrepreneurs in the oil industry was disproportionately low.

Represented by Angela Okoro, manager of capacity building of the board, the NCDMB boss said the entrepreneurship development programme would equip women with critical skills to participate effectively in the oil sector as well as other endeavours.

He said the training would place women entrepreneurs in a better position to benefit from the Nigerian content intervention fund (NCIF), established by the NCDMB in collaboration with the Nigeria Export-Import Bank (NEXIM).

“One of the reasons for getting this programme done is to ensure that women that participate in oil and gas business can have access to the [gender-based] fund,” Wabote said.

He said the strategy was to “teach them entrepreneurship; let them be entrepreneurs, so they’ll be able to apply”.

Wabote noted that in addition to the agency’s youth training programmes, it is customary for the NCDMB to carry out entrepreneurship training.

“One of the things we always do with our human capacity development (HCD) programmes is to train the participants on entrepreneurship, to ensure that if they don’t get any form of employment, they can do business on their own,” he said.

“In 2022, we trained 150 persons in different skill sets, and about 50 of them are now entrepreneurs in different fields. Some of them are watch repairers, some of them are dressmakers, caterers, phone repairers. We have someone in Yenagoa, who currently has over 20 employees.”