Blessing Otobong-Gabriel
In furtherance to it's reinvigorated effort to fight sexual and gender based violence, a Non-governmental organisation under the ages of Abiodun Essiet Initiative for girls has on Tuesday seek institutions synergy to deepen community sensitization and engagement to fight against sexual and gender based violence in the Federal Capital Territory.
The Executive director of the NGO, Abiodun Essiet who disclosed this during the community scorecard on community response to sexual and gender based violence validation and media briefing.
The ED noted that there is need to encourage synergy amongst institutions responding to SGBV at the local and state level to ensure effective response to cases of SGBV.
According to her, the SARC hotline phone should be made functional because so much work needs to be done, the action plan raised in each community is a way to start, saying there should also be permanent staff posted to the Centre so that they can deepen community sensitization and engagement and promote uptake of their services; leveraging on community referral.
"The United Nations Women joined the call for grassroots initiatives to “work with traditional leaders instead of working against them” in order to beat SGBV. Therefore, there is a need to strengthen the capacity of traditional rulers in promoting the social justice system and addressing SGBV cases".
In achieving this, she said baseline study was conducted to understand the peculiarities on ground before the intervention. This will aid the measurement of impact.
"Also, in line with the project implementation, we are to develop and implement scorecards on community responses to SGBV which is the reason we are all gathered here today".
"A Community Score Card CSC, is a two-way and an ongoing participatory tool for assessment, planning, monitoring and evaluation of services. It brings together the demand side (“service user”) and the supply side (“service provider”) of a particular service or program to jointly analyze issues underlying service delivery problems and find a common and shared way of addressing those issues. For this scorecard, the Traditional Rulers (or Council of Chiefs) are seen as the service providers while the community members are seen as the service users," she said.
"The community scorecard was an eye opening, interesting and shocking experience. Most of the traditional leaders that were interviewed saw some forms of violence as norms. In case of incest for example, in some communities, they see it as a taboo, and a reason to pray and appease the gods to cleanse the land, they punish the offender if the case is brought to them and that is where it ends. Cases are not taken to the police. An attempt in probing further, they claim it does not happen in their communities but if it does, it’s not been reported to them".
"Community members and the traditional leaders alike needs thorough sensitization of all forms of violence and the right ways they are to be handled. Traditional leaders need thorough training; disabusing their minds of norms and culture that tolerates SGBV, as well as, furnishing them with the legal ways of handling SGBV, referral system, record keeping and sensitization.
On Awyetu Sexual Assault Referral Centre, there is need to be sure if ROLAC project has ended as mentioned by the staff. The following should be considered:
"A more sustainable way of running the Centre in order to guarantee continuity of services and availability of commodities and drugs should be explored".
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