Women 2030:Mainstreaming Gender and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS)

ANon-governmental human right organisation, Women Environmental Programme (WEP), in collaboration with Echoes of Women in Africa, and Centre For 21ST Century Issues, recently organized a one-day training for Women Civil Society Organisations (CSOS) to realise gender equality and sustainable development goals.

The event held at Ogba in Lagos State, with the theme: “Step Down Training on Gender and Sustainable Development Goals’’ under the Women Civil Society Organizations also known as Women 2030 Project.

According to the Executive Director of Echoes of Women in Africa (ECOWA), Mrs Louisa Eikhomuh Ajbonkhese, the programme was designed to expose and sensitize participants to the SDGS, with emphasis on how the goals would balance gender issues.

The training was organized for female CSO Civil Society Groups in the south west concentrated on the Lagos State, towards realizing the 17 goals with 169 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, to know all about policy advocacy, and also to embark on a gender assessment field research on the implementation of the SDGS by the government

The Executive Director, Centre for 21st Century Issues, Mrs Titilope Akosa said: ‘’We are so confident with the coming into force of the SDGS as they will give us the platform and the leverage to address some of these issues, because if you look at all this 17 goals, Gender equality stands as a role and women’s empowerment for us, we want to engage all this SDGS from a gender perspectives, we want to see the entry point for gender and closely monitor to ensure that all the issues are addressed and also to see concrete imple- mentation and inventions, working on behalf of women and gender, for Nigeria. For instance, the issue of policy issues, the issue of law that are not gender sensitive, and those customs and culture that are incompatible with gender equality, we also want to use the space of the SDG to address them and ensure that all this things are resolved in favour of women and gender.’’

Akosa further noted: “Gender equality provides a platform to make equal access to opportunities by different groups. Our strategies is policy advocacy, we want to ensure a cutting edge policy advocacy at the local, national, regional and international levels, we want to ensure we bring our issues to the table, and we are part of those that are driving the solutions, and ensure those solutions are gender responsible.”

She encouraged women to get involved, participate and be the voice for women and ensure all issues are brought to the front-burner of public discourse, for the government to find sustainable solutions to them.

The Women 2030 project is a European Union-funded project being implemented in 52 countries across different regions of the world by a coalition of five global regional women and gender networks working towards the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals, including the global goals for SDGS.

The Women 2030 comprises of the following organisations which includes, Women in Engage for a common culture (WECF), Women Environmental Programme,( wep), global Forest Coalition(gfc),gender and Water Alliance(gwa),and Asia Pacific Forum on Women ,Law and Enforcement(apwld). WECF is the lead applicant of the women 2030 project while WEP is the lead partner in Africa.

The strategic objectives of Women2030 are to: Build capacity of women and gender-focused civil society organizations on planning, monitoring and implementation of the Sdgs/post 2015 agenda and the climate agreement; Create awareness at all levels of gender-equitable best practices and progress of national post-2015 SDG plans; Ensure more gender-responsive Sdgs/post 2015 plans with participation of women and women’s organizations. The participants were shared into group work and role plays that concentrated on five different project-specific thematic clusters of the 17 goals and 169 targets of the SDGS. The one-day training also introduced participants to the Women 2030 Project and explained the responsibilities of participating organisations to monitor the implementation of the SDGS and how to achieve change on the ground with women and men through gender assessments, writing of shadow reports, policy dialogues and sharing lessons learnt.