She 4 She Initiative Founder, Barrister Peace Oyanbo Owei, has consistently given women and the girl-child opportunities to build a career and create shared value for the society. Given her audacious quest to empower them, Chiemelie Ezeobi reports that her initiative has become as a thriving platform that restores hope to the hopeless, while giving them a lifeline
Most times, people who add value to others do so intentionally because it involves strategic planning on what and how to go about helping people, especially those they do not know.
The above sums up the selflessness of Barrister Peace Oyanbo Owei, who has invested so much in empowering women through capacity building to help create an enabling environment where they can have access to health care, build their self-confidence and be able to compete anywhere in the world for various opportunities.
This she has achieved through the She4She Initiative. Over time, She4She has emerged as a thriving platform restoring hopes to the hopeless with their many strategic reach out programmes that provides food for thousands, skills for yet another hundreds of young ladies and medical lifelines to those who cannot afford basic healthcare facilities.
Its objective is to be an advocacy group that fights for the right of women, to be placed in strategic positions of power and board rooms where policy decisions are made.
For Owei, she believes that empowerment is a process, not a product. Her words: “There has been immense progress to uplift women financially, politically and socially, but it is still an open-ended process. In the light of many ongoing, a clear vision emerges, a vision of the empowerment of each deserving one.
“Even though a new age woman is far more empowered but her progress skids to a halt when cases of violence or any unprecedented regressive evil emerges
“Empowering a woman today will lead to a progressive society for tomorrow and this silver lining is her motivation in analyzing any gender equality discussion and offering practical assistance to them.
Capacity Building in Abuja
Recently, she had a capacity training for 50 participants- all girls and women. At the launch, in a hall filled with women and girls and graced by dignitaries especially from the Niger Delta region, Owei succeeded in handing out certificates to over 50 participants who expressed joy with the training they received from different resource persons. Her target was; “Before the end of the year, we hope to have touched 300 women in capacity building.”
According to her, “empowering a woman is like empowering a nation, we don’t just want to launch for lip service sake, we have done training for 50 women this week, we did a little bit of entrepreneurship and capacity building for these women”.
In addition, she said: “Women in business were able to learn how to market their products using ICT and other tools that can help them package and market their products accordingly, while the women that are not in business were guided on decisions to take when they are trying to go into business.
“Right now we are leveraging on volunteering, we are partnering with individuals, corporate bodies, organisations including the government to advocate for our course.”
On subsequent training plans, she said: “We have a work plan on our training, the short term, midterm and long term work plan, we hope to do like two or three more training before the end of the year, we are not going to do it in Abuja alone, the first of the series, we titled it Woman Up, and gradually we will unveil how we are going to be doing states selections.”
The special guest at the Abuja launch was the Executive Director, Business Development, Nigeria Export and Import, NEXIM, Bank, Mrs. Stella Okotete, who is also the Women Representative of the APC Caretaker/ Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC).
Okotete lauded the initiative and described it as timely, adding that Nigerian women would benefit from the organisation.
Okotete said: “This is coming at a time where we need more women to be empowered as well as the girl child, the formation stage for any girl child in this country requires a lot of motherly support and when we empower the women, they will be able to give that support to the girl child.
“From our position as NEXIM, we have the women and youth export facility, we will be collaborating with her to see where we can upscale women in trade and go into export.
“Most of her participants are into agro allied related businesses, and export in Nigeria is what will help us diversify the economy away from oil and non- oil export is the way to go.”
Distribution of Food Items
The economy is shrinking. No thanks to the pandemic and the insecurity in the country. Food prices have soared leaving the less privileged helpless. To ameliorate the situation, She-4-She Initiative, as part of its agenda, distributed food items to residents of Gishiri and Jahi villages in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to alleviate the sufferings of poor residents.
The exercise reached about 500 beneficiaries with items such as rice, vegetable oil, salt, seasoning among others. Owei said she was moved by the plight of the residents at a time of economic hardship.
The outreach tagged: “7 items for item 7”, would be sustained to help residents temporarily, as the foundation is working towards other programmes to support women.
“This is a food programme where we give 7 items to women, this would enable them to go straight to the kitchen and cook what to eat. We are going to touch women in different areas,” she said.”
A beneficiary of the programme, Diana Dennis said the items came at a time of hardship where most families barely afford daily meals.
“We are surviving by God’s grace, we can no longer use N1,000 to prepare anything to eat, things are so expensive and I appreciate this kind gesture from the foundation,” she said.
Incentives in Bayelsa State
She4She Initiatives recently had a three-day event in Yenagoa. The first day was for medicals and women were educated on labor, pregnancy, delivery and breastfeeding in commemoration of the World Breastfeeding week.
The 25 -man medical team led by Public health Enthusiast, Dr Yomi Jaye(MIT-Harvard) carried out massive safe motherhood care and Primary Eye care for women.
Part of the incentives of the outreach included the distribution of mosquito nets, delivery kits to pregnant women and eye glasses for about 200 individuals with drugs administered.
In practical terms, the nurses demonstrated labour and breastfeeding skills with competition for women on health and wellness.
Owei added that she has a mission to raise the standard of living of women at all levels and she would stop at nothing towards making this happen.
She said:” The She4She Foundation is our own way of reaching out to the less privileged in our society. We have many programmes lined up that would impact on the lives of the people especially the women folks. Bayelsa is my home state and we decided it was time to return home to alleviate the sufferings of my people.
“Government alone cannot do this and that is why I am calling on well-meaning Nigerians to stand up and support initiatives like this so that more lives can be touched.
“Apart from the medical aspect of the campaign, the foundation distributed food items to over 800 families tagged; Bayelsa 7 Items for Item 7. With these provisions, all beneficiaries had seven items required to prepare food for their household. We are doing this because the cost of food has skyrocketed due to our economic challenges and other factors and we intend to continue to reach out to these vulnerable ones.
“Yet another programme was skill acquisition. It is tagged ‘Woman Up’ and so far we are impressed with the turnouts and seeing the joy and happiness in their faces encourages me to do more.”
