By Josephine Agbonkhese

In a grand move to advance the status of women on all fronts in Nigeria, the Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre, WARDC, recently brought together women’s rights stakeholders from across the 36 states of the federation, birthing a new campaign ‘Move for More’.

The movement, which is part of strategies towards achieving Result Area 3 of the UN Women and Global Affairs Canada one-year joint project tagged ‘Advance Women’s Political Participation in Nigeria’, will also seek to drive women’s political participation in Nigeria through the engagement of political stakeholders.

The ‘Move for More’ Campaign gathered women advocates and women’s rights groups including 100 Women Lobby Group, Women in Politics Forum (WIPF) and the Women Political Participation/Technical Working Group (WPP/TWG).

Defining the movement, Co-Founder, WARDC, Dr Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi, said ‘more’ means a lot of things and not necessarily the Affirmative Action’s thirty-five percent demand.

“It could be more guarantee of citizenship, more guarantee of indigene-ship, more human rights protection for women, etc. But, by and large, what we are saying is that the constitution is not enough. We need to do more for women across Nigeria.”

“WARDC is particularly contributing to Result Area 3 of the ‘Advance Women’s Political Participation in Nigeria’ project which particularly seeks ‘Enhanced Coordination Amongst Women Political Empowerment Partners’,” reiterated Emmanuella Azu, Acting Executive Director, WARDC, at a recent consensus meeting birthing the campaign.

Shedding more light on the project, Azu said: “This particular UN Women project was originally planned to be implemented in six project states including Ekiti, Kwara, Cross River, Ebonyi, Kaduna and Borno states. However, for us at WARDC, we saw that these six states alone cannot achieve the desired result. So, we expanded the states to include the entire 36 states.

“This meeting is to, therefore, bring together stakeholders from across the 36 states of the federation to see, how, together, we can collectively hold our parliamentarians accountable, at constituency level— that is, when they come back to the state. This is also to ensure they support the passage of the Gender and Equal Opportunity Bills at the national level.

“Under the ‘Move for More’ movement, we now have a constituted team consisting of state coordinators across the 36 states in Nigeria. So, going forward, WARDC will be implementing project activities with the theme ‘Move for More’ across the federation.”