INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 2020

Could I have been at a better place on the 9th of March 2020? I was at the OXFAM event in Abuja, where women were robustly celebrated! The theme for this year is 'An Equal World Is An Enabled World'  #EachForEqual  #IWD2020.Then came 'The Street Project's' theme-relevant spoken word rendition, where the concept of the 'Impostor Syndrome' (IS) was mentioned in passing. In my intervention, I explained the concept further, especially how it affects the average female in Nigeria on account of the partriarchy-driven socialisation process. IS makes the individual feel unworthy of any elevated position in which she finds herself! She doubts her self-worth!

Photo above L-R: Dr. Dayo Oluyemi-Kusa (Conflict Transformation & Gender Expert) & Constant Tchona (Country Director, OXFAM in Nigeria)

The gender-sensitive Country Director of OXFAM, Constant Tchona in his speech said 'If we want to fight poverty, we must first fight inequality'. Constant said equality is not a women's issue, but indeed a human rights issue. He reeled out statistics which brought to the fore the fact that 'the five richest Nigerians could take the country out of poverty...'. The presentation of the report: 'Time to Care: Unpaid & Underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis'. www.oxfam.org. The presenter of the report, Henry Ushie, gave a good account of himself when he made his presentation interesting by referring us to the link for the 'Global Care Calculator' - https://www.carecalculator.org. The bottom line was that after going through the gamut of various types of unpaid work on the site and summing up same for the 'urban' woman in Nigeria, the audience realised that if women were actually paid for such labour, the cumulative could be Trillions of US Dollars!

Photo above L-R: Dr. Dayo Oluyemi-Kusa & Ramatu Umar-Bako (Head of Influencng & Public Engagement, OXFAM)

To be sure, it is 'socially relevant labour' that has been unjustly appropriated as 'unpaid labour'! This needs to be corrected. This is what 'Generation Equality' is all about...