Nigeria Gender Report 2012

The British Council released a report about gender in Nigeria.

"This report provides a comprehensive view of gender in Nigeria. It assesses progress in key areas, including: employment and livelihoods, education and health, political representation, and violence. It finds that women and girls suffer systematic disadvantage and discrimination that is magnified for those in the poorest States and sectors of society. It recommends policies to improve the lives of women and girls and identifies priorities for action."

The key findings of this report are:

• gender and inequality of opportunity: Nigeria 80.2 million women and girls have significantly worse life chances than men and also theirs sisters in comparable societies.

• sound policies need follow up and implementation: the National Gender Policy has yet to bear fruit while implementation of the Convention on elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (CEDAW) has stalled.

• jobless growth, inequality and poverty: Nearly six million young women and men enter the labour market each year but only 10% are able to secure a job in the formal sector, and just one third of these are women. 

• rising incomes inequality hit women hardest:Nigeria is among the thirty most unequal countries in the world with respect to income distribution. Significant rural-urban differences in income distribution impact particularly on women, because 54 million of Nigeria women live and work in rural areas.

• pronounced regional gender disparity: Human development outcomes for girls and women are worse in the North, where poverty levels are sometimes twice as high as parts of the South.

• livelihood and productive entreprises: obstacles for women: Economic independence is an essential dimension of women’s empowerment. Improving their access to and control over resources increases investment in human capital which in turn improves children’s health, nutrition, education and future growth.

• girls' education: To capitalise on the potential of its people, and ensure healthier, more educated, empowered and productive citizens, Nigeria must invest in educating the mothers of the next generation

• maternal mortality: Nigeria has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world. One Nigerian woman dies in childbirth every ten minutes

• who make's decisions?: Only 9% of those who stood for election in Nigeria’s April 2011 National Assembly elections were women.

• violence against women and girls: One in three of all women and girls aged 15-24 has been a victim of violence. Women who have never married are more likely to have been attacked than married women.

To read the full report, click here.

To discover what Friends of Humanity does in order to help Nigerian women, clik here.