Strategic plans and actions for the advancement of women and gender equality are often set and put in place during such conferences along with mechanisms for measurement of achievements and follow up thereafter. Remarkable world conferences on women include the one at Nairobi, Kenya in 1985 and in Beijing, China in 1995.
The Office of the leader in the House of Representatives, Mulikat Akande, will be holding a national conference called The Nigerian Women Strategy Conference from Monday to Tuesday next week.
Akande said women will be discussing issues affecting them during the conference, particularly to strategize towards increasing the number of women in elective and appointive positions and for more women to be encouraged to vie for positions in 2015 and beyond.
This raises the question of the fact that some women conferences have been held in this country before without meaningful impact. To this, the house leader said the upcoming conference will be completely different as there will be outcomes from deliberations at the conference and those outcomes will be followed up.
She in particular said they will revisit political parties statutory gender provisions and generate practical commitments to actualise the provisions. “We will work on increasing the role of women in political parties, gender provisions in political parties and actualising them and building the capacity of female politicians,” she said.
She said the conference which has the theme Building Bridges of Opportunity: 2015 and Beyond will be a non-partisan one in which women will be drawn from all strata of the society.
The house leader, who disclosed this during her roundtable meeting with media practitioners in preparation for the conference in Abuja, said 10 women delegates are expected from each state of the federation and the FCT in addition to women groups, women focused civil societies, professional women associations, market women , Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development, international development partners, religious societies and women in the police and military.
She said the political terrain has been really challenging for women and those who have held political positions have done creditably well and their achievements need to be acknowledged.
She said the media is a strategic partner in achieving the goal. While urging the media practitioners to give support to the women in their coverage, she said there is need to give them prominence in pages, eschew insensitive headlines and report facts.
Also speaking, Deputy Chairman, House Committee on Diaspora, Mrs Betty Appiafi urged the media to give prominence to the issue of rape and violence against women plaguing the country.
Responding on behalf of the media practitioners, Yusuf Ali from the Nations Newspaper urged women in politics not to shy away or be afraid of media practitioners.
The conference will be declared open by President Goodluck Jonathan and will have in attendance, chairmen of the different political parties, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development and international development partners, to mention a few.
