It is not meant for women

So when are you getting married?

Don’t you know you are a woman?

Let boys be boys

I have your type at home!

Act like a lady

Conversations around women’s rights in Nigerian has been on the rise. Movements reclaiming women’s ownership of their own bodies like the #YabaMarketMarch and #JusticeforOchanya have taken place over the past year. On the recently celebrated International Women’s Day, politicians and a large number of companies made statements celebrating women. …

A statement by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the World Cancer Day, Monday 4th February revealed that nine out of ten women who die from cervical cancer are from poor countries, and that if action is not taken, deaths arising from the disease will increase by almost 50 per cent by 2040. The most prevalent forms of cancers in the African region include cancers of the breast, cervix, liver and prostate.

According to WHO “women are potentially at risk of developing cervical cancer at some point in their lifetime.” …

A large number of people throng the tapered streets of the market; cubicle-sized stalls are cluttered with colourful and chaotic displays of clothes, shoes, sneakers, lingerie amongst other fairly used products of different variations. Many customers have to walk the breadth and length of different plazas while jostling for space in the cut-and-thrust of the market, searching for the best bargain.

The Yaba market is a maze with different routes leading in and out, a crop of itinerant traders is littered across these strategic points trying to woo people. However, this strategy of upselling to potential customers has over the…

Boys like blue, girls like pink. Boys like cars, girls like dolls. Boys like adventure, action and explosions. Girls like being pretty, fantasy and housekeeping. Boys grow up to be doctors, professors, CEOs and leaders. Girls grow up to be nurses, children’s school teachers, secretaries and housewives. See a trend? Most psychologists do.

In 2015, The White House made international headlines for hosting a conference on gender-segregated toys. Several children’s media and toys monoliths, Mattel, Toys R’ Us and Disney were all present. The goal was to change negative gender stereotypes in children’s toys. But are these actually harmful?

Gender…

The Labour Force Statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics in December 2018 was trailed by mixed reactions, sparking heated debates on social media with many dismissing the reports as ‘fictitious’, ‘buffed up’ and ‘tainted’. The Labour Statistics Report, which reveals Nigeria’s unemployment and underemployment figures between 2017 (Q4) and 2018 (Q 1–3) increased by showed that the rate of unemployment grew from 18.8% to 23.1%.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), to be ‘Unemployed’ implies that a person falls within the current labour force age population of within 15 to 64, but must be willing and…

JOHANNESBURG — Women in South Africa earn less than men, but consistently pay more across many categories of unavoidable monthly expenses including basic toiletries, grooming products, medical screenings and haircuts, a new survey conducted by leading financial services group Sanlam shows.

The survey of 500 females and 500 males, which coincides with the start of Women’s Month, shows that while 98 percent of women claim to spend over R100 on monthly toiletries, only 23 percent of men do.

Over 30 percent of women surveyed said they spent over R1,500 per annum on medical screening, versus only 1.2 percent of men.

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Financial inclusion is progressively gaining momentum globally, however, the gains are yet to even up. The 2017 World Bank Global Findex Database report on financial inclusion reveals that over 60 million Nigerians do not have bank accounts. The report ‘The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution’ employed data from a survey conducted in 144 countries, in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gallup Inc.

Financial inclusion is critical to the implementation of some UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, especially improving gender equality because increased access to financial services for women leads to an…

When Nigeria’s Agriculture and Rural Development, Minister Audu Ogbeh launched the National Gender Action Plan (NGAP) on Agriculture in October, the idea was to upgrade women from the realm of subsistence farming to medium scale and commercial farming.

The figures provided by the minister at the launch showed that Nigeria has 95% subsistence farmers, 50% of whom are women. Beyond this, women farmers in Nigeria have to contend with unequal access to land, insecurity, cultural practices and pseudo-religion dogmas.

“Despite the huge labour investment of women, productivity is low and they often have limited roles in decision making on the…