I know you are super passionate about girl-child education. Why are you very passionate about girl-child education?
The girl-child or women in general are my first constituents. You can’t have a passion for anything if you don’t share their story. I know that women empowerment and girl-child education are smart things to do. Girls will eventually become women and we know that women empowerment is not just the right and just thing to do but the smart thing to do because when you empower a woman, you empower a community. So, as a development advocate, I’m very passionate about girl-child education.
What are the barriers you see and what do you think the action has to be to break it as quickly as possible?
There are a lot of barriers to the female gender, from things like lack of quality education to period poverty, especially for the girl-child in our communities in the Warri Kingdom, to social expectations. From where most of the girl children come from, poverty is already a barrier but on top of that are social norms with girls more likely to be told to stay at home with their mothers and go to the market as opposed to going to school.
There’s also a huge barrier with early teenage pregnancy; as an advocate, I’m looking for how we can prevent that but also to encourage women or girls in our area to go back to school or to learn skills that would better them. So, I mean the barriers are quite enormous. What I’ve seen in the first line of engagement with women and girls in our community are some of these barriers, social norms out of school, education, period poverty and teenage pregnancies. (Channels)