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Ignorance, major challenge of Nigerian girl child – Abagun

Olaoluwa Abagun is the founder of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), Girls Pride Circle Nigeria, one of the winners of the British Council’s Future Leaders Connect…

Olaoluwa Abagun is the founder of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), Girls Pride Circle Nigeria, one of the winners of the British Council’s Future Leaders Connect and member of Commonwealth Youth Gender and Equality Network (CYGEN). In this interview she spoke on girl child rights, sexual violence, reproductive health and girl child education.

 

What is the main focus of your NGO?

I was passionate about girl’s rights, particularly girl’s rights to education, equal opportunity and violence free communities. In 2014 I decided to set up an NGO known as Girls Pride Circle Initiative when I was in Obafemi Awolowo University. 

So what my organization basically does is to, at the grass root level, engage the community members, the stakeholders, local governments, parliamentarians on how we can move girls rights forward, how we can support them and how we can invest in girls. We also have education club we are currently working in Lagos. 

We have over 20 education clubs across Lagos. We actually engage these girls and train them on topics like leadership, menstrual hygiene, sexual violence, how they can be leaders, how they can change their communities and how they can advocate. So far we have reached out to over 1,500 girls with the support of lots of NGOs, like an NGO Known as Women Believer in the USA and British Council is looking to support us to go forward in the future. That is what we do and we hope to do more in the future. 

What are the challenges you faced in championing the course of girls rights in the country?

Our major challenge is having committed volunteers that can help us in carrying out projects. So the issue is that as a growing non-profit organization our resources are limited. So we actually relied on volunteers because getting volunteers that have skills in media, public speaking, leadership training has been our major challenge so far. There is also a challenge of accessing funds as a young NGO. 

What do you think is the main problem of Nigerian girls? 

I will say that young girls do not know about their sexual and reproductive health rights. We have a lot of cases of sexual violence going on in the country. We have a lot of cases where by girls can’t even manage their menstrual period with hygienic sanitary pad. So girls don’t even have access to that. 

Education is an issue really bordering Nigerians now. We have the highest number of out-of-school children in the world where over 10.5 children are out-of-school. That is over the population of Portugal and two third of that number are girls. So I think we need to look into education by educating the girls-child. 

We also need to look into preventing sexual violence in ensuring that girls have knowledge about their sexual and reproductive health particularly menstrual hygiene. 

What measures should be taken to tackle these problems?

I’ve always said that there are not many legal buriers to sexual violence in the country. We have all the laws in place. Even our criminal laws have criminalized sexual violence. I will say it lies on everybody including the National Assembly, the Government, the police, the judiciary to ensure speedy access to justice for survivors, people that were already violated.

We also need community leaders and stakeholders to educate people at the grass root that these things are not family matters. These days we have uncles, fathers, brothers raping girls and people do not want to report to police. 

We have to ensure that these are eradicated at the grass root. Any incident should be reported.  Another thing is Government should enforce our laws. We are not enforcing laws that criminalized sexual violence. Judiciary has a role to play. 

I recommend speedy dispensation of justice. We know that our court system can be tricky. Therefore, speedy dispensation of justice is something that will go a long way in eradicating sexual violence in the society.

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