ROLE OF WOMEN TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT HIGHLIGHTED ON THE OCCASION OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

Before now, men were regarded as sole breadwinners in families while women stayed at home and carried out domestic work as housewives.

However, in recent times husbands and wives play active roles to see to the upkeep of their families due to dwindling state of the economy.

As the global community today mark International Women’s Day, our Human Rights Correspondent examines the role of women to socio-economic development in line with the theme of the celebration” Press for Progress”.

A housewife according to the Webster Dictionary  is a married woman who is in charge of her household as a female domestic manager and is not employed outside her home.

In a conventional society, a housewife is a married woman whose duty is solely to care for her family and carry out domestic work but the poor state of the economy has not helped matters and as a result, forced many women who would ordinarily wished to be housewives to take to entrepreneurship.

Many others who wished to get into small or medium businesses are constrained by non-availability of finance.

A career woman who later became a housewife but wouldn’t want her name to be mentioned, said she resigned from her job to take adequate care of her children.

Given the economic situation in the country, government at all levels are making frantic efforts to ensure socio-economic empowerment of women through various skills acquisition programmes for the nation.

Another Entrepreneur, Ijeoma Nnaji who is a senior citizen said she still deemed it necessary to provide some of the needs in her family.

An Enugu-based Legal Practitioner, Mr. Joe-Sunny Onovo noted that women played vital roles in national development and stressed the need for adequate empowerment for them in line with the 1999 constitution as amended.

Mr. Onovo while advising women to engage in meaningful economic ventures called on government to include mentoring and women friendly programmes targetted at women.

AMAKA UCHENNADIUKWU