Our women, girls need better attention

In Nigeria, hunger etches some of its darkest features into girls, women and children. Citing a recent report from the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 7.3 million women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 are undernourished from a figure of 5.6 million in 2018.

The report also placed Nigeria as one of 12 countries hit hardest by the global food crisis brought on by the Covid-19 crisis and made worse by the war in Ukraine.

According to the report titled: “Undernourished and overlooked: A Global Nutrition Crisis in Adolescent Girls and Women” which was published ahead of the International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8, gender inequality was deepening the nutrition crisis with severe consequences for their present health and reproductive futures. The report also warned that unless urgent action was taken by the international community, the impact of this crisis could last for generations to come.

It presents one more problem that women and girls in Nigeria have to contend with even if one chooses to overlook the fact that 55 percent of adolescent women and girls suffer from anaemia while nearly half of Nigerian women of reproductive age do not consume the recommended diet of at least five out of ten food groups.

The reason why all well-meaning Nigerians and indeed every well-meaning citizen of the world must continue to shout from the rooftops for an equal, equitable and peaceful world is that without a world where equality, equity and peace reign supreme, too many things would remain grotesquely and savagely out of place, including the lives of many girls, women and the children they bear.

A world without women is simply unthinkable. A world without healthy and thriving women is a world that is as sick as what we have today. With everything women bring to the table, it remains scandalous that they remain vulnerable to everything that goes wrong in a country as poorly planned as Nigeria.