1 week ago
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As the satellite marks the International Day of Care and Support connected October 29, experts and advocates successful Nigeria are reigniting the speech astir 1 of the astir overlooked drivers of the nation’s system attraction work.
At the precocious held GHS Media Parley hosted by Global Health Strategies (GHS) successful concern with That Good Media, thought leaders, media professionals, and women’s rights advocates gathered to sermon the taxable “Centering Care: Unlocking Women’s Economic Power successful Nigeria.” The treatment underscored the pressing information that attraction enactment is the invisible motor keeping households, communities, and the system running, yet it remains mostly undervalued and unrecognized.
Care Work: The Hidden Potential for Nigeria’s Economy
Opening the conversation, Adeola Alli, a multi-licensed pharmacist and Founder of OneHealth, painted a vivid representation of Nigeria’s existent attraction reality. She revealed that astir 70% of attraction work, from caring for children to tending to the sick and elderly, goes unpaid, and the bulk of this labour is performed by women.
“The planetary attraction system could adhd 11 trillion dollars annually to the GDP if decently valued. Imagine what that could mean for Nigeria if we admit caregiving arsenic existent work,” she said.
Adeola stressed that failing to operation and put successful the attraction system not lone limits women’s fiscal independency but besides stunts nationalist growth. Her telephone to enactment was clear:
“We indispensable physique an system wherever attraction is superior and each enactment of healing becomes a operator of wealth.”
Professionalizing Care Work successful Nigeria
Adding to the conversation, Amara Agbim, Founder of The Nanny Academy, emphasized the urgent request to professionalize attraction enactment successful Nigeria.
Through the Nanny Academy, Amara has trained and certified a increasing web of home and attraction workers, creating pathways to ceremonial employment and dignity successful a assemblage agelong dismissed arsenic “unskilled.”
“Paid attraction enactment is indispensable but suffers from systemic undervaluation. Care workers contiguous are often undocumented, underpaid, and subjected to excessive hours without contracts, societal protection, oregon rest,” she explained.
Amara highlighted that structured training, just pay, and ineligible designation are captious to elevating attraction and enactment enactment from informal labour to a respected profession, 1 that contributes visibly to the economy.
The Legal Gap and Need for National Policy
Speaking from a argumentation standpoint, Crystal Ikanih-Musa, an International Lawyer and Global Policy Expert, pointed retired that Nigeria lacks a broad nationalist instrumentality addressing attraction work. She called for authorities that protects caregivers’ rights, sets just labour standards, and integrates attraction into nationalist economical planning.
“Without comprehensive, evidence-based laws that legitimize attraction jobs, the needs of women, children, the elderly, and radical with disabilities volition stay invisible,” she said.
Her remarks echoed a broader truth; that attraction is not simply a backstage oregon home contented but a nationalist economical priority.
Balancing Paid Work and Care: Women astatine the Crossroads
From the workplace perspective, Ivie Temitayo-Ibitoye, a Senior Human Resources Professional, spoke candidly astir the realities women look successful trying to equilibrium nonrecreational aspirations with attraction responsibilities.
“Care is enactment successful itself and should beryllium treated arsenic such. It’s not a privilege radical usage to flight responsibilities, it’s a show enabler, not a distraction,” she said.
She further emphasized the request to situation the stigma that makes moving women consciousness blameworthy for ...
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