Gilbert Ekugbe
Yiaga Africa has called on economic managers to increase budgetary allocations in the 2022 appropriation bill to eradicate gender base violence by 2030.
At a capacity building workshop on gender responsive budgeting in Lagos, the Programme Manager, Yiaga Africa, Dr. Ernest Ereke, said the two-day workshop is aimed at eradicating the pandemic of violence against women and girls targeting six States of the federation.
In his words, “It is a spotlight initiative by the European Union and United Nations to eliminate violence against women and girls and the target period is by 2030, where would have eradicated this pandemic of violence against women and girls.”
“We are gathered here to discuss how we can deliberately use government budget to reduce or eliminate entirely, violence against our women and girls. We want to see how we can use the instrumentality of the budget to see if we can reduce the violence against women and girls,” he said.
He said the workshop would also look at trending analysis on budget allocation to the gender sector from 2019 to 2021 to see if they really addressed the violence against women and girls in the country.
“We are hoping that the budget as far as women and girls are concerned can be improved in 2022. It is a very serious business for us and we want the outcome to give an improved budgetary allocations to gender issues especially violence against women and girls. We want to see this reflected in the 2022 appropriation bill that we would be seeing across the federation,” he added.
Also speaking, the Commissioner, Ministry of Finance and Budget, Adamawa State, Dr. Ishaya Dabari, said the Adamawa State government has dedicated 35 per cent of its budget for women development.
He said the State had also created a ministry of entrepreneurship to take care of youth empowerment and upliftment.
He noted that the move was to uplift the standards of youths and women in the State, stressing that projects like this is very key to achieving peace in the society.
“When there is serious development, gender violence especially domestic would be eliminated. This is why we want to make a budget that would carry everybody along while also focusing on job creation,” he said.
We want to train the youths, provide for the women and ensure that everybody is carried along. When people are empowered, they will have resources to bring about peace and orderliness in the society,” he added.
The Senior programme officer, Yiaga Africa, Yetunde Bakare, said the spotlight initiative takes a look at mechanisms to be put in place to address sexual and gender base violence as well as addressing the root causes.
She said one of the growing factors for sexual and gender base violence is a behavioral issue calling on the need to address the social norm
