NGO seeks more advocacy, representation for women in political positions

Kimpact Development Initiative (KDI), a non-governmental organisation, has called for more representation of women in political and leadership roles in Nigeria.

Speaking on Wednesday at a one-day media training organised by KDI alongside Women’s Democracy Network, Bukola Idowu, team lead of the organisation, said women were poorly represented, spotlighted, or voted for at the last general election.

According to Idowu, since the return of democracy in 1999, the number of women elected into political positions has not been encouraging.

Idowu said 1,557 females out of the 15,303 candidates that contested the presidential and governorship seats in the last elections, compared to 3,032 that contested in 2019. 

He called for more representation of women by the media. 

“Democracy is all about inclusion and equal representation for that matter. So, what we have tried to do is to look at the root cause, and what the issues are that is what led us to a different strategy of coming up to see how we can mitigate this downward trend in terms of representation,” he said.

“I think that the major issue we have is culture, religion, and the mindset of the people that are affected by representation in Nigeria. So one of the key instruments is the media. The media is a powerful tool for reorientation, reengineering as well as education.

“But if you ask me one of the best ways to combat some of these stereotypes such as religion and culture is by getting results and we can actually get results by experimenting. We have seen it all over where you have women out there, they perform. I am not saying all of them are performing 100 percent.

“Now we have seen that women can manage both human resources and financial resources. Why not allow them? We can see the ability to multitask. What we need to do is just to support them and they will now begin to see society getting better.”

Idowu also said more female representation and involvement in socio-economic matters would bring about a reduction in insecurity and increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country. 

Speaking at the training, Lekan Otufodunrin, executive director, media career development network, said the media must play a role in advocating and increasing representation to close the gap.

“We have seen data to understand how even the state assemblies don’t even have women. So, first is to let women know what’s happening to them, and shock them into the reality especially those that are passionate about politics,  but need representation, ” he said. 

“This is where the media needs to be intentional. They need to see the gap. Let parties be intentional. Let them even call it a quota system. Let them know that they could have maybe two-thirds of their members be women, even when they cannot achieve that. Not now that we have only three women in the senate there is something wrong about that.

“So we need to wake up to reflect on our population. If women are a bit more than men according to our existing population, there is something wrong when they are not represented at all.”