The Ford Foundation and the African Centre for Leadership, Strategy and Development (Centre LSD) has launched a N95m grant to bridge gender imbalance gap in the extractive and natural resources management and empower women in Nigeria.
The Programme Coordinator, Centre LSD, Mrs. Victoria Udoh, said this on Tuesday in Abuja at the formal launch of the Centre LSD BUILD Grant Project.
According to her, the grant was for general support for strengthening an inter-sectoral approach to gender and natural resources management and project support for institutional strengthening, especially on women.
She said that the entrenched gender bias not only prevented women from engaging in and accessing economic benefits, but also manifested in how companies and governments engaged with communities at all stages of extractive activities.
She noted that in Nigeria women face systemic discrimination in all phases of the extractive industry.
“The mineral and mining Act 2007 which guides processes and procedures in the sector is gender blind, and as a result, company-community consultation and decision-making are done in alienation of women and their perspectives. The result is increasing gender inequality and the further disempowerment of women.
“Centre LSD in sync with the government’s determination to reform the extractive industry and diversify revenue resources to include non-oil revenue, implemented the Strengthening Civic Engagement and Advocacy for Effective Natural Resources Governance in Nigeria Project.
“The aim was to mobilise citizens to participate in the governance of natural resources for the mineral sector to contribute significantly to the Gross Domestic Product,” Udoh said.
She said that during the implementation of the project, emphasis was not placed on the gender dimensions of the impact and benefits of the extractives on humans as the effect on men varied from effects on women and children.
She also noted that women could lose such influence when their livelihoods were lost because of extractive industry projects and that at the same time, men’s influence could increase significantly when they were employed and received incomes from extractive projects.
She said, “To address these anomalies, Centre LSD is implementing a grant, still in the extractive sector, specifically looking at how to integrate gender in its extractive work to lay the foundation and baseline for this new intervention.
“The Centre is commissioning a research on the forms and prevalence of gender-based violence in the extractive sector in Nigeria. The research will lay the basis for advocating for women’s inclusion and participation in the governance of natural resources in Nigeria.”
She said that the project in tow folds was for institutional strengthening interventions, and programmatic interventions and that the N95m project scheduled to run for five years would in the first phase run for one year before review.
On his part, the Executive Director, Centre LSD, Mr. Monday Osasah, said that the centre implemented a project called strengthening civic engagement and advocacy for effective natural resources governance in Nigeria from 2016.
He said that because of the successes registered in that project, the centre got a renewal from Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
He added that the success of the project attracted the Ford Foundation to also offered supports as the centre was able to mobilise citizens, government’s miners and others to participate in the discus of natural resources.
“This project essentially brings some form of equilibrium to the representation that we currently have so that everybody will take ownership of whatever that is happening in their domain particularly for mineral bearing communities,” Osasah said.
