Two things contributed to the decision of the Chief Executive of Civil
Resources Development and Documentation Centre (CIRDDOC), Mrs Oby
Nwankwo, to form a Non-governmental Organisation (NGO). One was her
experience when she was Chief Magistrate in Anambra State where she had
watched vulnerable women come to court without necessary legal help
.
Secondly,
she had watched her sister die in the hands of a brutal husband in the
United States, which climaxed her resolve to help women who are less
privileged . Fourteen years after, she told Daily Sun that she is
satisfied with her achievements so far. Excerpts:
Impact of CIRDDOC
CIRDDOC
was established in 1996 and since then it has been working in certain
specific areas. Our mainstay is work on women's rights. Women's rights
include the reproductive rights of women and the political rights of
women. We have been involved in empowering women, to be able to come out
and contest for political positions. In the 2007 elections, we
supported 10 women in each of the states for positions such as
councilors and local government chairpersons.
In Enugu and
Ebonyi states that is where the elections were already held and in
Anambra we are yet to hold local government elections, but in Ebonyi
State, for example, we had three women who won elections, one won as
local government chairperson and two won as councillors and this is
because of how we started with them. We held big workshops, meetings and
this workshop was to groom them, build their capacity in esteem and
confidence; prepare them for public speaking.
The other area we
have worked is the area of budget monitoring. We have different
components in this area, one of them is the gender budgeting component
where we are looking at the budget process starting from the local
government level, how do we begin to make the local government budget,
the state government budget gender sensitive, how do we help? We have
held several training programmes for officials of government who are
responsible for writing the budget, who are responsible for implementing
the budget, budget officers from Ministry of Finance, Ministry of
Economic Planning; we have held several meetings and you cannot quantify
the impacts these have made. But a lot of feedback we got is that they
didn't know that this was how it should have been done. At the
grassroots level, of course, you know we have 15 community information
centres because as we are empowering people we are putting the
structures in place for them to sustain these powers that they are
getting and to use these structures to achieve more, to go beyond what
CIRDDOC can give to them.
So, in these community information
centres we have trained development information officers who are working
there, we have trained para-legal who are working there, we have
trained civil educators; so the communities have access to these centres
and will be able to access information, something that has never
happened before. In remote communities in Ebonyi State we have centres
where we have put generating sets; people have power there and can watch
television and listen to the news and know what is happening in their
state capital, these are happening in 15 communities in these three
states. So, there is a lot happening, but most of them are in terms of
empowering people by showing them the way because somebody has to fish
and the person will take it from there rather than giving the person
fish every day.
Satisfaction on our efforts
I am really
satisfied. I didn't want to talk about our para-legal scheme. Our
para-legal project where we have free legal project, we provide free
legal services to women, particularly widows whose rights have been
violated, I am very, very happy with what is going on in that
department. I am very, very happy when a widow sees me somewhere and I
didn't recognize her, she comes up to say, aunty you don't know me, I am
so, so and so; you helped me to recover property my husband's people
seized from me, you don't know me when I was having problems with my
husband, when I was sued for divorce you helped me with a lawyer. But
what is important is the kind of joy that you have given to people, the
kind of succour that we were able to give people who ordinarily would
not have been able to come out from where they are.
So I am
very, very satisfied with what we have done so far, I know that we could
have done more, I know that we can still do more, but you know funding
is a constraint. We have done great work with women who are living
positively with HIV/AIDS. We have worked to set up anti-violence against
women committees in the communities in Cross River State and in Ebonyi
State, we have anti-violence against women committees, these are people
from the communities themselves who have taken the power to be able to
ask questions, to demand for their right because their capacities have
been built, because they have learnt that I have a right to this,
therefore, I must ask for it. So these people in the communities are
there checking violence against women and the feedback we get is that
violence is now forbidden in these communities. We have traditional
rulers who have been empowered and they have taken over and have made
bye-laws.
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