Abimbola Junaid, a United Kingdom-based parliamentary aide and development actor, has said that Nigeria needs a deliberate policy to skill-up the girl-child in a digital era.
Junaid made this known at the second edition of Digital Rights webinar series hosted by ITREALMS in collaboration with DigitalSENSE Africa, Domain Name System ([DNS] Women – Nigeria) and NaijaAgroNet, on the theme: ‘Women and Rights in Digital Era.’
She noted that despite the gains made so far with the digital era and women having more voices, there are some lamentable aspects that should be addressed promptly.
Junaid cited an instance with women celebrities often facing threats of exposing their nude photos on the Internet at this digital age in the name of blackmail, wondering if opposite sex ever posts their nude pictures too.
“So I’m a woman. I then use the technology and now digitalized, but I didn’t have my freedom to do what I want to do because someone would post on the internet,” she decried.
Junaid maintained that the law of every land must tend to protect every citizen and human beings within her domain.
She urged Nigerians to be alive to their fundamental responsibility by tasking the government and lawmakers to come out with requisite laws and policies to boost the girl-child ingenuity, accomplishment, prowess, art, intelligence, expertise, among others.
“Every law and every policy made actually cost you so much money to get there. The number of advocacy, the number of lobbying, etc,” she said.
Those laws, Junaid pointed out, cost money, stressing that if a law has been passed and it is not working for the population, “that’s taxpayer’s money down the drain.”
Emphasising that if anyone, especially women are limited by laws of the land and cultures, and beliefs about who is a woman, first from the home, then it’s limiting for a woman to engage on the path.
“But what the law can do is to leverage it. If the law enables the woman, every other person would obey the law and follow the law,” she declared.
Junaid further noted that the rights of women really lies with the law, stressing that as a civil society actor, her advocacy will continuously be that “we must hold the law accountable for the rights of the women and must show that we are training everybody, not just the men because we need to change the mindset of the men and everything else.”
She maintained that Nigeria inevitably requires a deliberate policy to skill-up the girl child with CSO movement by following through such policies from commencement to implementation.
