The very much awaited Report from the British Council is out. The Gender in Nigeria report 2012 and it is not a good report to look at, the statistics are high and alarming. According to the report which was launched today at the Transcorp Hilton of which Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was the co-Chair, states that;
- Nigerian women not only occupy fewer positions in the public sector, but earn consistently less income than their male counterparts. For instance, women occupy fewer than 30 percent of all posts in the public sector and only 17 percent of senior positions. In addition, nearly five times as many judges and permanent secretaries are men rather than women.
- While income equality in the formal sector has grown over the years, only one in every three employees in the privileged non-agricultural formal sector is a woman. Worse still, only 15 percent of Nigeria’s 80.2 million women operate bank accounts and a woman is three times less likely than a man to receive a bank loan.
- There are 54 million women who live and work in rural areas and even though women constitute 60-79 percent of the rural workforce, a woman is five times less likely to own land than a man.
- And despite being better educated than their male peers in the micro-enterprise sector, women are less likely to secure loans and three times less likely to be employed.
This shows that Nigerian women and girls have significantly worse life chances than men and other women and girls in comparable societies.
This may look like statistics to you but this is not just statistics, these numbers are lives.
What does this mean to you?
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