The UN Women has called on private and public sector stakeholders to promote inclusiveness by ensuring women can access financial resources.

The country representative to UN Women and ECOWAS, Beatrice Eyong, said that only 10 per cent of women in Nigeria have access to financial resources for entrepreneurial development and access to public procurement.

She said this at the UN Women and Partners Open Day for South-West held in Lagos on Thursday.

Ms Eyong said gender equality was central to attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the country had been lagging by 40 per cent.

“As long as we’re not able to accelerate gender equality, we will not be able to accelerate the SDGs, and that’s why we’re here to recognise the fact that we cannot do this job alone.

“We recognise the fact that we cannot stay in Abuja and do the work, so we’re going to the six geopolitical zones; this is the third zone that we have been to. We started with South South, North West, and here we are in South West,” she said.

Ms Eyong said the UN Women wanted to showcase its work through the Open Day and the need for women to have access to information to make decisions that would empower them.

She noted that through the various initiatives of the UN Women it had given a second chance to thousands of women who missed out on education due to early marriage, childbirth and other factors.

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu said the Lagos government had intentionally given women a voice and would continue to do so.

Similarly, the commissioner for women’s affairs and poverty alleviation in Lagos, Cecelia Bolaji-Dada, said that women’s voices needed to be heard in all decisions affecting them.

(NAN)