On Friday, 29th July, members of the PAWED coalition embarked on an advocacy visit to the Enugu SME Agency.
Participating in the advocacy visit were:
- Nkem Awachie (South Saharan)
- Ozor Modesta (AWITA)
- Nebo Collins (New Century Initiative)
- Chinyere Otuonye (Empowered to Empower Multipurpose Cooperative Society)
- Jessica Ezieme (South Saharan)
- Chinasa Onuoha (FIDAN)
The participants were welcomed into the office of the Director- Arinze Chilo-Offiah. They introduced the PAWED project to him and explained that the advocacy visit came as a follow-up to a recently-concluded policy dialogue session on Women’s Economic Empowerment, to which he had been invited.
At the policy dialogue session, several issues surrounding WEE had been discussed, and after deliberations by stakeholders from different sectors, it was decided that the most urgent issue was “low public awareness of existing economic empowerment opportunities“.
The solution to this issue is threefold:
- to create a publicly-accessible online database of current economic empowerment opportunities
- to have a robust awareness campaign (especially through radio) for each economic empowerment opportunity created by the government
- to build the capacity of women in rural areas to be able to apply and partake in available economic empowerment opportunities.
The participants informed the Director that the SME Centre had been pinpointed as a worthy MDA to undertake the creation of the online database for current economic empowerment opportunities. Due to the fact that the SME Centre is already focused on economic empowerment and has an active website and online presence, which is indicative of the fact that they have the know-how to implement this solution.
The Director informed the participants that they already had programs which they had implemented, but would not be able to handle a central online database for economic opportunities, as they did not have that information.
He hinted at the fact the upcoming change in government might affect the willingness of current office holders to start new projects, but he offered to share a brochure of the SME Centre’s projects.
The participants thanked him, and the visit came to an end.
