Together, advancing gender equality has the incredible opportunity to enhance young women’s participation and optimal engagement in the economy. It is more important to ensure that women’s voices are heard and centred in thematic policy, implementation and intervention processes. That was the message at the recent webinar organized by Nigeria Youth SDGs Network in partnership with Development Research And Project Center (dRPC), unpacking the complex topic of challenges and solutions to young women’s economic empowerment.
The well-rounded panellist from various sectors, including government (Mrs Nabila Aguele), non-profit organization (Ms Christiana Onoja), civil society (Mrs Abosede George-Ogan) and MSME business sector (Ms Damilola Bello), answered a series of questions on developmental policies, business landscape, and challenges to young women’s economic empowerment.
Financing is a critical catalyst to scale intervention and ensure sustainability.
“It’s inevitable that developmental policies are essential in tackling significant barriers affecting young women. However, it’s not enough to have beautiful policies; developmental policies should be targeted, measurable, and sustainable with a cohesive approach,” said Nabila Aguele, the Special Adviser to the Minister of Finance and Budget as she explained. At the same time, developmental policies have a lot of progress. Financing remains a colossal catalyst to scale intervention and ensure sustainability. Through financing sectors scaling meaningful impacts, paradigm shifts exist in ensuring efficiency, transparency and sustainability. With specific requirements for Government and MDA’s budgeting in the “Gender-responsive lens”, the 2022 budget has continued to prioritize specific gender-focus projects, including The Nigeria for Women Project, Job for Youth Project, Ministry of Agriculture- Gender Responsive Project aimed at empowering women and other finance bills on the pipeline to support young women.”
When it comes to the impact of digital space and technology, bridging the gender digital divide is essential to ensure young women are not left out of the opportunities presented by the digital world. Christiana Onojo, the founder of the PAWA initiative, emphasized that we are in a unique and challenging moment at the time of digital transition, leveraging digital space and bridging the digital divide gap. Young women have the opportunity to leverage the digital space through the technical and non-technical skills available. Creating a roadmap for self-learning, utilizing resources and information online, leveraging on social media platforms and failing early rather than later are essential guides for young women on the digital transition.”
Young women need the continuous push and support to start and scale their businesses.
Furthermore, the main challenge discussed at the webinar is the business landscape and the current status of young women in business. “Women are resilient and resourceful economic agents, who continue to weather the storm and overcome barriers to advancing their business,” says Ms Damilola, Founder of Pages by Dami. “While women start a business for different reasons, we need to speak the language understood by young women through continuous push, support, incentive and funding opportunities to enable them to scale and improve the status for young women in business,” she explains.
The risk in business is excellent as there are both potentials and disadvantages. However, a careful balance must be struck to mitigate business risk, improve the enabling environment and allow innovation and creativity to flourish instead of stifling them.
There is a concise need for more alternative pathways to education and skill building for young women.
The panel discussion at the event also explored the role of education in empowering young women. Mrs Abosede George-Ogan, Founder of WILAN Global, spoke about the importance of a solid educational foundation and its impact because “it provides an avenue to gain technical capacity, digital literacy and the 21st-century skill set which will lead to an empowered young woman.” She further emphasized the need for alternative pathways to education and skill building and how “removing barriers to education and training, bridging the huge digital divide, access to finance, improving technical capability— provides the opportunity for women to reach their full potential.”
READ – Promoting The Economic Empowerment Of Young Women In Nigeria
Immediate Action and Collaboration
Driving engagement and intervention for meaningful participation of young women is not for one sector alone. “We need to have a unified framework, take a more coalition-centred approach to advocacy and engagement. Leverage expertise by all stakeholders and get to a melting point of collaborative intervention to scale impact for young women,” says Nabila Aguele. As she explained, “measuring gender and empowerment results in programs and intervention can significantly highlight learnings and opportunities for collaboration across different dimensions.
Abosede George-Ogan elaborated on this crucial point by saying, “There is a need to collaborate in a more strategic way to prevent recycling beneficiaries and results. We need to understand the varying strengths and what we can bring to the table as partners and collaborators. With the Government bringing policies and funding. Non-profit bringing unique technical capabilities and trust. Private sectors are fulfilling job creation and training. There is an opportunity for every stakeholder to play a collaborative role in prioritizing women.”
In the closing session, Taibat Hussain, senior technical advisor for dRPC shared the overview of the PAWED project to ensure young women are effectively targeted in intervention, policy processes and other thematic areas. The project area of focus includes understanding how economic policy and incentives are moving and how well women are targeted. “That’s why these conversations are important and happening right now. We need to have more conversations like this to ensure a well-rounded perspective from young women,” she said.
Overall, the webinar uncovered the most critical value for engaging women: ensuring that young women, who are correct at the core of these interventions, are equal partners in programs, design, and platform engagement. The vital role of research and policy coherence concerning interventions and solutions to enhance young women’s economic engagement and participation should be a priority.
Download the Issue Brief on Young Women’s Economic Empowerment in Nigeria
This event is supported by funding from Development Research and Partnership Centre through the Partnership for Advancing Women in Economic Development (PAWED) project.
