2027: Gombe women mobilise stakeholders, unveil demands charter

The Gombe Women Agenda on Wednesday mobilised religious and traditional leaders, as well as other critical stakeholders, to support its campaign for greater inclusion of women in governance and decision-making ahead of the 2027 general elections.

The convener of the group, Ibrahim Yusuf, disclosed this during a stakeholders’ engagement in Gombe, where the group presented its proposed charter of demands for women in the state.

Yusuf said the Gombe Women Agenda, an umbrella body comprising more than 100 women’s organisations, was established to harmonise women’s concerns and engage political aspirants ahead of the 2027 elections.

He said, “We want to engage the incoming politicians for 2027 so that we can harmonise and work on their issues, challenges, resolutions, recommendations and advocacy engagement.”

According to him, the group deliberately involved men, religious leaders and traditional institutions because women alone could not achieve the objectives contained in the agenda.

“We feel it is not necessarily just to engage politicians directly without getting the buy-in of men. So, we mobilised all the stakeholders to adopt and share the document with them,” he said.

Yusuf said the proposed charter contained 10 major pillars and about 20 recommendations, with education, maternal mortality and women’s economic empowerment among its key priorities.

He said, “The issue of education, especially the education of the girl-child, should go beyond where it is. There is also the issue of maternal mortality and economic empowerment because so many women are contributing to the micro-economy but they are not recognised or mentioned in any forum.”

He added that empowering women would have a wider impact on families and communities because women remained central to household and community welfare.

“Women are more vulnerable because they take care of men, children and sometimes people with disabilities. If you really want to touch the lives of everybody, if you touch the lives of women, definitely you are going to solve half of the problems of our community,” Yusuf said.

On the role of religion and culture in women’s political participation, he said the stakeholders had critically reviewed the document to ensure that it reflected the values and concerns of the different religious communities in the state.

He said misconceptions surrounding women’s development often created barriers to their participation, adding that religious and traditional leaders could help bridge the gap.

“They have listening ears of the executive or politicians. So, if anybody emerges, definitely we are going to make use of them where we cannot reach those politicians. We will make use of their platforms to reach out to them,” he said.

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Yusuf said the group planned to formally launch and make the document public within the next two to three weeks. He also urged Nigerians to participate actively in the 2027 elections and resist intimidation at the polls.

“Our expectation is that people should come out and vote, but they should vote wisely. They should stop being intimidated by any politician,” he said.

“They should collect whatever anybody brings because, after all, it is their property and their money. But during voting, they should use their conscience to vote wisely so that better people will emerge at different positions.”

Also speaking, the Secretary of the Gombe Women Agenda, Mrs Ruth Abner, said the stakeholders’ meeting was necessary because the women could not achieve their objectives without the support of influential community leaders.

She said, “The stakeholders we have gathered today are the backbone of our movement. Having gone through the process of bringing out the agenda of Gombe women, we realised that we cannot do this without their help and support.”

Abner said the group comprised more than 100 registered women’s organisations and was focused on ensuring that women were heard and included in decision-making. “We are expecting women to be carried along, women to be heard and women to be included at the decision-making table,” she said.

She identified lack of support from men, domestic restrictions, electoral violence and insecurity around polling units as some of the factors discouraging women from participating fully in elections. “A lot of things are stopping women from coming out or distracting them or not giving them the confidence to come out and vote,” Abner said.

She added, “We first of all need to be secured and safe. We need security.” Abner said the group would intensify grassroots advocacy and sensitisation to encourage women, particularly those in rural communities, to participate in elections and resist the temptation of exchanging their votes for short-term benefits.

She said the group was not insisting that women must necessarily be the candidates on the ballot, but wanted political leaders who would listen to their concerns and address them.

“We are not insisting that women must be on the ballot. If we can get a man that will listen to us and even solve the problem, we don’t have a problem,” she said.

“We are not competing. We are begging and laying down our problems to be solved. That’s just it.”

She said the group’s projection for 2027 was to see greater recognition of women’s challenges and their increased participation in decision-making, adding that grassroots mobilisation would remain central to achieving the objective.