CHALLENGES OF THE GIRL CHILD IN NIGERIA

By:  Amb. Nnedinso Patience Eze - Founder Eze Patience Foundation

The ugly living conditions, survival of girl children in Nigeria and the preferential treatment of boy children cannot be over-emphasized. 

Girls are discriminated against in Nigeria in access to educational opportunity, food, and nutrition. Girls carry heavy burden of farm work and house work. Girls are married off at early ages, which interferes with their education or acquisition of skills needed for survival. 

Beliefs must be changed about the value of girl children. Rapid economic development is dependent upon elimination of gender bias. Female education serves as an investment that will help facilitate the achievement of family planning objectives and the production of healthier children. 

Poor female nutrition contributes to greater vulnerability to disease and to poor physical and mental development. It is recommended that nutrition be improved for females, early marriage should be outlawed, and parents should be educated about the benefits of later marriage. 

A National Children's Commission should be set up for defending the rights of the girl child in an educational, social, cultural, political, and economic context. The Commission should maintain statistics on child survival and other socioeconomic factors. 

Parents have an important role to fulfill in helping female children achieve the basic necessities of survival and development and in learning about the fundamentals of child development and care. Teachers have an important role to play in teaching about sex education, drug education, family planning, HIV, hepatitis B, dangers of early marriage/early childbirth eg. exposure to vesicle vaginal fistula disease. 

Women's groups have an important role to play in focusing attention on various problems confronting girl children eg. Rape, Insest etc. Government must focus more resources on reducing the inequalities between boys and girls, change discriminatory laws, and establish political stability.

 On this International day of the girl child, I call on the International Community especially the donor agents to increase and direct their aids to female child survival. I call on the Nigerian Government to review punishment for rape and kidnapping upwards to life imprisonment or death sentence. Security should be intensified in all schools in Nigeria especially the girls schools to forstall a replay of the Chibok girls issue.

 Universities in Nigeria should rise up to their responsibilities of punishing every lecturer that demandnfor sex in exchange for admission or Marks. 

All hands should be on deck to protect, promote and provide for the girl child in Nigeria