The 2024 theme of International Women Day (IWD) is “Invest in women: Accelerate Progress’. This highlights and brings to fore the importance of gender equality, women’s and girls’ empowerment and also highlights Women’s Rights to healthier lives.
Going through history, International Women Day originated when women workers in the needle trades marched through New York City’s Lower East Side to protest child labor and sweatshop working conditions, and demand women’s suffrage on March 8th. So  beginning from 1910, March 8 became annually observed as International Women’s Day
 The 2024 IWD theme will trigger  the efforts that foster the progress of today’s women. When you look at the theme of the 2024 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women which is ‘Accelerating the achievement of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of all women and girls by addressing Poverty and strengthening Institutions and Financing with a Gender Perspective’, you see the correlation of both themes. The emphasis is on how to empower Women and Girls, to bring them out of poverty and interrogate and seek ways to strengthen institutions and ways to enhance financing of women endeavours. This will bring about investment in Women and would accelerate progress. Remember when you empower Women you empower the Nation
Education not only for women and girls but for all should be focused on skill acquisition and development. Education policy should be refocused so that a young graduate should be able to have skills that will make him or her self employed as this would accelerate progress. Women should engage in creativity and innovation by embracing technology as this bring endless opportunities
Yes it’s quite disheartening that despite the efforts of women and their contribution to development, they still remain under-represented in politics, governance and at the top leadership of large corporate organisations. The reason for this is not far fetched, we have the cultural barriers that hinders women,  hostile work environments and subtle biases like stereotypes and even intra gender animosity where women fight their fellow women. For a woman to be in leadership position, she works twice as much as her counterpart who is a man. Women always are challenged by glass ceiling whereas men always enjoy glass escalator. 
In the political scene there need to be a level playing ground where women and men have equal opportunity. Money politics should be discarded as women do not have so much money for politics. Again women are peaceful and can not cope in the violence associated with politics in this part of the world. To be able to get to their rightful position in political leadership women should encourage each other, wealthy women should support the younger ones to take up political positions. We should also have the God Mothers not only the God fathers.

Again women should attempt to be involved in party politics. A situation where a woman is appointed as Women Leader in political parties should be discouraged as there is no man leader. Nothing stops a woman from being Chairman or Secretary of a political party. More women should be in the main stream of the party structure as that is where important political decisions are taken
The renewed commitment this year’s theme  would have on women is that the awareness is created through various programmes organised by different organisations and institutions to mark the day and men are encouraged to give women the chance to unlock the potentials the Almighty God invested in them as that will accelerate progress in the society

Nkiruka Ifekwem Ph.D a Public Analyst and Gender Expert is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at Bells University of Technology, Ota

Source: Drumnewsonline