Usie: FG Not Gender Inclusive in Appointments

Country Director, Plan International, Charles Usie, spoke with Ugo Aliogo about the gender discrimination in President Bola Tinubu’s administration, judging from the few appointments where females are less than 35 per cent, among other issues. Excerpts:

In July 2023, you launched a new country strategy. What does this mean for the organisation, the young people in Nigeria, especially girls because that is the core of your activities?

I think the starting point is to talk about who we are as an organisation and why we have a strategy. So, Plan International is 85 years old as an organisation that was established to seek for the rights of children and advance equality for girls. That is who we are globally, and over 85years period, our mandate suggests that we should focus on children and girls, and their welfare to ensure that we add value to them, living better lives.

The process is such that we come up with a strategy that guides our work, because you need a strategy that focuses on your work and create the necessary impacts, because you cannot do everything. Now, you have the privilege of revising our strategy in Nigeria because the structure is such that the global body gives the general picture and each country, is supposed to domesticate it to suit their context to deliver that same mandate for girls and children. This is what we have done with this strategy. So, the mandate is the same for children and girls across the world and Nigeria. However, because the dynamic and issues children and girls face differ in each country, it is the responsibility of the country team to domesticate that to suit their own context and that is what we have done by our strategy, so you will see that it is not very different from the global strategy.

What we have done with the global strategy is to ask ourselves what does this mean for us in Nigeria, and what are the kinds of initiatives that we will do in Nigeria, for children and girls to actually deliver those mandates, but at the same time contribute to the global mandate that is why we have our own strategy in Nigeria. So, for instance, the global strategy talks about being able to reach directly 200 million girls over five-year period globally. But for us in Nigeria and being one of the biggest country offices globally, we have taken the mandate to reach 10 per cent of that population, so in Nigeria our strategy says we are going to reach 20 million girls directly in the next five years with all forms of services.

Bauchi is the only state in the country that is yet to domesticate the Child Rights Law as at November 2023. What are you doing to ensure domestication of the child rights bill in the state?

Bauchi State is one of our most invested states in Nigeria. We have been in state since we came to Nigeria in 2014 and we have supported them mainly with governance, education, and health interventions. Those even form the key thematic areas or the key intervention areas for our work in Nigeria.

Bauchi State is one of those states where we have implemented very successful interventions for health care education and gender-based violence.

So, in Nigeria, you always find us where there is a talk around education and health, especially adolescent health and issues around, protection where you talk about gender-based violence- all forms of gender, exclusion and equality you will find us in those kinds of spaces. You will also find us in spaces that talk about nutrition especially for children under five and for pregnant and lactating mothers. Those are the key interventions areas in Nigeria. So anywhere we work in Nigeria, we try as much as possible to layer all of these interventions in the state to get more tractions and support many people as possible.

Bauchi State is one of the states where we set up our first and only pad banks for girls in schools. We set up pad banks for young girls in 10 Local Government Areas and Schools in Bauchi State and what that means is that it helps to ensure that girls remain in school and girls actually go about their lives with dignity because they know they can easily access menstrual pads. It may interest many Nigerians to know that many girls miss school simply because they cannot afford menstrual pads and so when they are menstruating, they sit at home because they can’t afford pads and so they miss out from school. We find that to be unacceptable and what we try to do is to bridge that gap and we did that working with an American-based company that produces menstrual pads known as Cortex and we did it in Bauchi State.

It was from these investments and work that we found out that they (Bauchi State government) had not domesticated the child rights act and so we have been working with them and one of the things we did was this. What Plan International is doing is actually supporting this parliament to build their capacity, their knowledge and understanding of what this law will do for children and for girls especially and they have agreed and they said this is the right thing, though they have customised it to suit their law and customs in the state.

It is exciting to state here that the bill has now been passed and signed into law by the Bauchi State Governor. You know elections are every four-year cycle and there is a new government in town.

Recently Plan International called on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister to prioritise addressing the plights of youths in Abuja, expressing concern over increasing unemployment. Since your organisation’s focus is centered on child and girls’ rights, what are you doing to address the challenges faced by young people across the country?

For us, this is interesting because the plight of young people across the country is getting more difficult as it stands. One of the biggest trends, we have seen among young people in Nigeria is what we understand as the “japa syndrome”. What we have found out is that we are losing the best of our young people who are traveling out of the country to other destinations outside Nigeria, and that for us is a big brain drain. You know for many years, say over a decade we have been talking about brain drain, but this is the worst form of it where we have hundreds of Nigerians leaving the shores of Nigeria daily and the reason is simple, there are no economic potentials and opportunities for them to live a decent life in Nigeria.

This worries us because that is what we are set up as an organization to pursue. We are an organization set up to advance the rights of children and equality for girls and for young people. Right now, when you talk about equality and inclusiveness for young people in Nigeria we are at an abysmally low. Young people are not well represented in the status of governance both at State and at National levels. Young people do not have enough economic potentials to actually create a life for themselves.

Jobs are unavailable. Unemployment rate is at its highest level that it can be over close to 30 per cent from depending on which statistics you are looking at. All of that points to the fact that young people are actually grown in underpaid jobs and for us we asked ourselves how can we add value to this, therefore, there are a couple of things we are doing one, first we are looking to invest in the individual capacity of young people, so we are creating opportunities for young people as far as the northeast of Nigeria that is ravaged by conflict for 11 years is concerned.

We have been able to invest in young people, one of such is a young girl who is the first female phone repairer in the northeast now not even in Maiduguri which is the capital of Borno State. But in Mafa Local Government Areas now that is a Local Government Area that is not even in the center, it is a bit out of town.

She is the first phone repairer because we asked her what she want to do with her life and she said she had basic education. But she said she wanted something that can give her income to sustain her life and that of dependents and we asked her what she wanted to do, so she said she wanted to learn how to repair phones. So, we took her to a training centre, where she received the requisite training. We then provided her with the equipment to start and now she has a big shop where she is even employing other people and everybody goes to her to repair their phones. She is generating enough income she takes care of herself and 10 more girls. She is already training other people now that is just one tiny example of the way we are investing in the individual capacity of young people across Nigeria.

In September you trained Civil Society Organisation (CSOs) on economic literacy accountability and governance. What was the intended outcome of this?

So, this is actually one of our projects, which is funded by the European Union (EU) in Nigeria. So, the EU in Nigeria is in discussion with us and looking at the way we work with young people and all the things we have been able to achieve, decided to find out what we do for young people to support education initiatives in Nigeria and we said we are not responsible for education because it is actually a statutory responsibility of both federal and state governments. In fact, it is on the concurrent list of federal, state and local governments. So, it is a 100 percent responsibility of government. Our role is to support government to deliver on this, and one way we can do that is through what we call advocacy and budget monitoring. So, what we have done is that we have told the EU, to give us some money, let us test this approach.

Many civil society organisations do not even know how to engage with government to hold them to account when it comes to education spending. So, for instance, if they see a budget of a state government, would they be able to interpret it to know how much has been allocated to education? And then for that which has been allocated to education, would they be able to know how the budget lines have been created to support different education initiatives? So that is the value we are bringing. We are saying, let us support you and these civil society organizations based in States. So, they are literally representative of the people. We are training them. We are supporting them with capacity to understand how to interpret government budgets.

The 16 days of gender activism have ended. What does this mean to your organisation?

It means a lot to us. First although the world and Nigeria celebrated16 days of activism. Plan International Nigeria, it is 365 days of activism for us, it is an everyday activism because gender-based violence does not happen for only 16 days. It happens every single day and for us our mandate is that every day is activism against gender-based violence so that is the significance for us why because we believe that the kind of pains and hurt that women and girls go through is on daily basis.

As we speak, somewhere, and somehow, a man is actually either beating a woman or subjugating her to some form of torture and pain. It happens on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on an hourly basis. So, for us, the significance is that it is not only when the international community has marked 16 days to talk about it. We talk about it every day.

Secondly, as members of Plan International, for any of us who wear this badge, the pledge we make is that we will not be found wanting when it comes to gender-based violence. In that way, it means that it is an everyday lifestyle. Because for us, we judge ourselves very harshly. That if we talk about it, then we must show it in our actions and lifestyle. So, you must live it out. You must be an ambassador, and don’t live it out only for 16 days.

You have to live it out for every day. That is why I say for us, it is 365 days of activism, because every day, you must call your attitude to action and ensure that you are not one of the people who are perpetuating any form of violence against anybody. That is the second significance for us. The third significance for us is that it is not just against women. Men also face some form of violence. Children face violence.

In July, you unveiled an education project to return 8,000 girls to school in Borno State and of particular interest is the accelerated basic education programme. How much impact have they made so far in the lives of children?

This is a very interesting project that is being funded by the EU. So, the EU entrusted us once again with another contract to say there are a lot of children who are out of school, especially in the northeast of Nigeria, particularly in Borno State. How are you going to help them? and together they gave us some money to say how many children can you support to come back to school in a one-year period? And we have identified 8,000 as a number. So, within the next maybe 14 months, we are going to work with the Borno State government to bring back at least 8,000 children back to formal education. And this is a big deal if you consider the number of children who are out of school.

It may interest you to know that it costs money and it takes a lot of investments to bring children who have been out of school for many years, to bring them back at the right level in school. But why Plan stands out in this approach is because of the approach we use which known as the accelerated basic education programme and in fact, it is done in conjunction with the federal government of Nigeria. We have been able to support the federal government of Nigeria to develop a curriculum, which we call the curriculum for accelerated basic education, to bring back children who have been out of school for many years, to bring them back to formal education. So, a common example is that imagine a child who is six years old, but because of the conflict in the north is dropped out of school and then they were migrated, moved from one place to the other, were internally displaced. And now they have become settled and they want to go back to school. But now this child is 12 years. At what class does this person go back to school? That has been the challenge and so when you find this difficulty, that is why we now have a whopping over 10 million children who are out of school. Because then once they leave school and miss school for many years, it is very difficult thing to bring them back to school.

Before the general election, Plan International issued a statement noting that political parties’ manifestos were not gender inclusive. With a new government in place, would you say this administration is gender inclusive?

From our assessment and what we observed, this government is still not gender inclusive because there are international and national statistics for that.

First, in Nigeria, we have what we call a 35 percent affirmative action of government appointments. If you look at the current appointment of ministers and senior government officials. This includes ministers, special advisers, and director generals, every key appointment made by the president. What we have in Nigeria, the policy says 35 percent should go to women. From the few appointments we have seen, we don’t have up to 35percent. In fact, we barely have 20 percent. Even 20 per cent is a very generous percentage. For the ministers alone, we have less than 10 percent. Then the second part of this 35 percent affirmative action is with our parliament.

If you look at the combined House of the Senate and the House of Representatives, we have less than three percent of women. three percent. In fact, it is worse than what it was in the previous.

In August, you advised the government to prioritise education and adolescent health. Are you pleased with the government’s focus in this area?

Well, in terms of the commitments, and the statements made by this current government, look very progressive. You know, in terms of the commitment for young people, that is where you find the whole issue around the student loan.

If you look at the president’s commitment to provide investment for young people in businesses through his different platforms, those commitments are good. So, they are not enough, but they are good. What we are saying is that it is not enough to make commitments. It is enough to bring it to action.

For instance, the previous government came up with a very elaborate and powerful project around what we call N-Power. N-Power was strictly designed for education and to support young people, to give them access to finances, and access to business. It was part of social protection programme because social protection looks more around everybody such as the aged, old men, women. But the N-Power was targeted at young people out of that social protection programme, which was a good thing. So, it just shows that the government is being very deliberate around young people.