A professor of Adult Education at the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike (MOUAU) in Abia State, Mrs. Nneka Augustina Umezulike, has charged her colleague adult educators to fight for structures that would give women more access to education, training and high-level income-earning appointments.
Delivering the 42nd Inaugural Lecture of the university, titled, ‘Adult Education: Desideratum For Democratic Governance and Human Development,’ Umezulike stressed the need for the Nigerian government to formulate not only broad-based national policies on the status of women, but also promulgate laws to enhance their democratic Rights.
Umezulike, who stated that such policies should contain, in clear terms, what Nigeria, as a country, considers as unacceptable human rights abuses, especially on the harmful and oppressive social practices against the general well-being of women, described education as the only tool that can be used to save women from the deadly clutches of gender inequality.
Nigerian women, she posited, have low level of awareness of their fundamental rights, because there are virtually no formal or non-formal institutions or centres where human rights education is being conducted in Nigeria; hence the violation of women’s rights in the country by those that ought to respect them.
