Ngozi Nwoke
Amb. (Mrs). Unyime Ivy-King sits at the helm of affairs as chief executive officer, HTT Communications Limited, and executive director of the Save Our Women and Girls Foundation.
Her preoccupation is working for gender education and advocacy for women empowerment, organising skills programmes to create social development, awareness and building capacity for women and girls.
In this interview with Daily Sun, she advocates a return to positive family values and speaks against sexual and gender-based violence.
You run multiple NGOs, including the Save Our Women and Girls Foundation. What are the aims of the foundations?
The Save Our Women and Girls Foundation (SOW&G) is a non-profit organisation established in 2016. The main focus is to create social developmental awareness on issues that concern women and girls. The other one is targeted at training young people for leadership and entrepreneurship roles in society. The story of what is now the Ubong King Foundation cannot be complete without the story of the King’s Men platform. During one of our conversations many years ago, I came up with a mentoring idea. “An Evening with Ubong King” was birthed. The idea became a mentoring platform that turned out to become impactful. For me, it is an eye-opener to the fact that there are still mentoring gaps that need to be filled in society.
However, we have done a lot to provide mentoring to lots of people in differing capacities, especially when we offer employment opportunities for families. I also started having home book readings when my first book was published in 2012. The idea was to reach out to families that were dysfunctional, for which the book proffered solutions.
It is important to see young women achieve self-sufficiency and become productive citizens without compromising moral values or thinking that they must have a man to actualise their potential in life, because, when we empower the girl-child, we empower the nation, not just the girl alone.
What’s your level of achievement in terms of empowering girls and women?
We focus on mentoring, training, educating and building the capacity of women and girls in Nigeria. In the past three years, we have done a lot in our capacity to affect the lives of hundreds of women and children through our different skills training initiatives in the communities in Lagos and beyond. We also trained over 100 women for two weeks in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, through a project tagged WEST (Women Empowerment Skills Training). It was a successful pilot scheme because we laid the foundation in many businesses.
We were in Cross River State in 2018 for the WEST project, where we trained over 200 women. We planned to carry out the next project in Enugu this year, but the coronavirus pandemic broke out.
We have also organised many skills acquisition training in Lagos, where the NGO is based in different communities in Ikota, Sangotedo, Badore and Ajegunle. We also had a two-week intensive skills acquisition and entrepreneurial development training designed to empower girls and women, and it was designed to run in all states of the federation over time.
We have young girls and women who have been able to put the different skills they acquired through the foundation to productive use and have developed their own businesses in soap-making and other household detergents, bead-making, fashion designing and bakery.
What challenges did you encounter in the course of the empowerment schemes and how did you pull through?
One of the major challenges has been the issue of raising funds to keep our intervention projects running. If not because of our firm belief in what we do and the grace of God, we would have probably given up. Our reach has been largely limited by financial constraints because we have to pay staff and facilitators and get training equipment too. A lot of intervention projects have been largely funded, aside from some support from private individuals and a few stakeholders who believe in us and in what we do. So far, I can say that the response has been quite poor.
Another challenge we had to tackle was the attitude and response of some of the participants to the opportunity. For some, maybe their parents or relatives sponsor them to the training and they come in initially with a laissez-faire attitude. But we brought in an expert who ensured that the trainees stayed in class during the training sessions and made at least 90 per cent of attendance. With the way the training was structured, once a trainee comes in, they know they are in for serious business. That was how that challenge was resolved.
We also encountered the challenge of location. Finding a suitable location, finding the girls and women who really need the training, planning the training itself in a way that its impact is felt in that community long after we are gone.
As an advocate, what recommendations you would give to stop the alarming rate of gender inequality that has resulted in incessant sexual violence?
The United Nation Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality calls for the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and girls by 2030.
A lot has been written about gender issues. Nigeria, for instance, is a signatory to numerous international and regional conventions that seek to promote the development and well-being of women and girls. Many women bodies and organisations at different times have called for affirmative action to remedy the gender gaps.
Sadly enough, gender inequality is a huge challenge globally and leads to practices, which are inimical to the female gender, such as child marriage, lack of education for the girl-child, and domestic violence. Gender inequality begins from the home. This is because the home is a child’s first place of socialisation. It is where he or she picks up the values that would serve them later in life, and it is where inimical stereotypes are birthed and reinforced. In our country, many cultures celebrate the birth of a male child, who is considered the one that would carry on the family name. There is a high preference for male children and, as a result, a woman who bears only female children is treated as if she committed a taboo.
I believe the home is the first place where the quest for gender equality should begin.
It is the parents who teach the children their place in the world. From the boardroom, politics, community to the family. Any nation that gives room to its womenfolk to participate in their economy is on the way to significant growth and economic achievement.
Women could contribute greatly to improve our potential as a nation, if given the favorable opportunity and platform. Parents should raise their male and female children to understand that their gender doesn’t make them any less more important. Parents should appreciate their children, both male and female, and guide them to express their unique gifts and abilities.
What is your view of the contemporary woman?
The contemporary woman has come a long way from her olden-days counterpart. She is not afraid to step out of pre-assigned moulds and stereotypes into living the kind of life she aspires for. A contemporary woman is bold, tough and intelligent.
She understands what her strengths and weaknesses are, and knows how to order her life in a way that maximises her strengths and minimises her weaknesses.
Sadly, the past generation made a huge mistake in undermining the woman’s power and mistaking her soft exterior to be weakness.
The contemporary woman has realised her potentialities and harness them to make the world better for herself and her family. Today, she is a captain of industry, leader and also wife and mother.
However, regardless of her choices, the contemporary woman is judged. She should constantly evaluate and renew her priorities and go for what really matters to her, instead of literally killing herself so as to live up to the lofty expectations that dishonours the value and abilities she possesses.