UN Women tasks community leaders to include women in peace, security building process

Community leaders in northern Nigeria have been charged to include women in peace and security building processes, aimed at speeding up peace mechanism and check-mating their marginalization in decision making, especially in violent issues that affects the female gender directly.

This was stated in a one day workshop tagged ‘Promoting Women’s Engagement in Peace and Security in Northern Nigeria,’ under the auspices of United Nations Women, funded by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and European Union (UN).

The workshop submitted that a baseline survey agreed in peace initiatives holds that women are conspicuously marginalized from the top hierarchy of decision-making structures and mainstream peace and security bodies, adding that women representation in position of decision-making is very low, particularly in elective posts, rating Gombe as low as zero percent, Adamawa, 6.3 percent and Plateau 9.2 percent.

Speaking at the roundtable interaction, the Gender Technical Advisor on Women, Peace & Security Programme of UN Women, Ms. Sewuese Surma, stated that violence against women and girls are covered up, denied or silenced by under-reporting, societal stigmatization of victims or by institutional weakness/failure in terms of absence of effective and accessible reporting mechanisms and protection services at community level.

Surma said, “there is a very low level of awareness about gender equality policies and legislation, or efforts to promote them; the general lack of awareness on its National action plan also confirm low awareness about peace initiatives and gender-specific provisions.”