By Emeka Samuel,Uyo
As part of its effort to eliminate gender based violence and increase awareness to Sexual Reproductive Health Rights, a Non Governmental Organisation, Civil Resource Development and Development Centre(CIRDDOC) has NGOs launched a house to house awareness and enlightenment campaign in Akwa Ibom State.
The campaign, funded by Amplify Change Initiative and in partnership with Coalition of Eastern NGOs according to the Akwa Ibom State coordinator of CENGOs, Mr. Israel Ekanem would run concurrently for five months in both the urban and rural areas of the State.
Ekanem, disclosed this on Monday, at a two day workshop, tagged ‘Household discussion training on gender based violence and sexual reproductive health,’ organised for community educators in Uyo.
He told participants to always make referrals and encourage people whom they meet at the field to make use of help lines to report gender based violence such as rape, immediately, adding that such would enable prompt arrest of the suspected perpetrators.
In his remarks, the focal person of CIRDDOC, Mr. Paschal Anozie said the door to door campaign was a strategy to tackle the problem of GBV proactively and to encourage people especially women/girls in the rural areas to access sexual reproductive health services as provided by government as it is their right to do so.
“The purpose of this campaign is to eliminate issues of gender based violence in our communities and to render basic sexual and reproductive health information for people in the community.” Anozie said.
He however hinted that the campaign would be replicated in all the nine States of the old Eastern region.
One of the resource persons, Nancy Onya-Oko encouraged mothers not to shield issues of sexual violence perpetrated either by their husbands or sons for the sake of protecting their marriages saying that doing such would render the advocacy, counter productive.
She also pointed out the spike in GBV issues during the lockdown occasioned by corona virus pandemic in a pre-existing toxic environment and urged participants to always direct such people to referral centres provided for more information and access to sexual and reproductive health services.
