By: Mohamed M. Sesay
The West Africa Women and Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone (WAWGE-SL), has on Tuesday the 11th of October 2022, commemorated the International Day of the Girl Child with the Theme; “ Our time is now, our time our future”.
Alma Barley, the Programme Director of the West Africa Women and Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone, intimated that the motive for celebrating the International Day of the Girl Child is to remind school going pupils to be focused on their studies. She also disclosed that their organization has been helping with mental health campaign, counselling and domestic violence. She said they also do yearly donations to less privileged homes and also supporting rural farmers with logistically and financial supports. She continued that their organization has the undying passion to eradicate all forms of social injustice against women and girls. She however noted that they are sometimes constrained with financial and logistical supports in in line with their respective duties. She appealed to government and other development partners to be aiding them with logistical and financial supports towards their activities.
The Guest Speaker Hon. Emilia Lolloh Tongi, commended the West Africa Women and Girls Empowerment Sierra Leone for staging such an education events for school pupils. She considered that school pupils a very lucky pupils as they now have many organizations including the “Hands of Our Girls” campaign which geared towards eradicating all such of sexual and gender based violence against women and girls.
Hon. Lolloh Tongi added that it is not a societal secrecy that over decades, girls have been missing out on the social experiment to make them as valuable contributors to national development. She continued that girls were denied the right to have good education, lack of economic empowerment, including social functions all because of the dominant patriarchal system by then.
She maintained that a girl child should be seen as a gem to every family but sadly enough, she said wrong African culture has been disadvantaging women and girls. Hon. Tongi also disclosed that it was based on such dominant Patriarchal system that informed the Beijing Declaration in 1995 created a platform to recognize the multiple injustices girls were suffering from. She added that the Beijing Declaration precipitated October 11th to be declared as the International Day for Girl Child.
“This day is to recognize the challenges and difficulties young girls face during their daily activities. The general aim is to help girls find training and education in order to help create successful women. When we talk about supporting the girl child, it is preferred to agree that issues of such training should stem around foreign discuss, education, equality, child marriage, access to specialized health services, and issues with gender based violence”, she said.
