The Federal Government has announced its inauguration of a National Gender Steering Committee for the Implementation of the Gender Policy in the Agricultural sector, in a bid to offer equal access and gender-sensitive approaches towards food production.
This was disclosed by Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Ernest Umakhihe, who inaugurated the Committee on Wednesday in Abuja.
“The initiative will promote and ensure the adoption of gender-sensitive responsive approaches, plans and programmes in such a way that men and women will have equal access and control of productive resources,” he said.
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He added that availability of the policy document was expected to address the vulnerability of women to biases in the Agriculture sector, integrate gender perspectives in National Planning, create more jobs and financial empowerment for women, citing that the National Gender Policy in Agriculture was consistent with the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by World Leaders at the United Nations Summit in New York, USA, in September 2015.
Director, Special Duties in the Ministry, Mrs Fausat Lawal also stated that “Women, small scale holder farmers constitute about 70-80% of the agriculture labour force and they produced the bulk of food for domestic consumption.”
She added that the policy document is a developmental strategy for poverty reduction and it is expected to empower small scale holder farmers who are predominately women.
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What you should know
- Female unemployment rate in Nigeria as of Q4 2020 increased to 35.2% from 31.6% recorded in Q2 2020. This is according to the recent labour force report released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
- A total of 61.63 million women were in the working population (15 – 64 years of age) as of Q4 2020 accounting for 50.5% of the total working population. Only 30.15 million of these women were willing and able to work, which represents about 43.3% of the total labour force in the period under review.
