NCDMB, UN Women Explore Joint Measures to Expand Women’s Role in Oil and Gas

The Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), in collaboration with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), is about to advance joint initiatives geared toward boosting girls’s participation within the oil and gasoline business.

Central to this effort is increasing entry to the devoted $40 million Women in Oil and Gas Fund, guaranteeing that extra women-owned companies and professionals profit from business’s alternatives and play a stronger position throughout the sector’s worth chain.

In April 2021, the NCDMB established a $20 million fund devoted to supporting women-owned and women-led companies within the oil and gasoline sector. The Nigerian Export-Import Bank (NEXIM) complemented this effort by matching the fund with a further $20 million.

However, regardless of this vital dedication and favorable mortgage phrases, the uptake of the scheme has remained beneath expectations thus far.

On Thursday, UN Women’s Country Representative to Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Ms. Beatrice Eyong, led a delegation to the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board’s (NCDMB) Abuja liaison workplace. The crew was obtained by the Board’s General Manager of Corporate Communications, Dr. Obinna Ezeobi, on behalf of the Executive Secretary, Engr. Felix Omatsola Ogbe.

The assembly explored proposed capacity-building initiatives for NCDMB personnel, geared toward mainstreaming gender views into the Board’s undertaking planning, budgeting, and execution frameworks.

Other key areas of debate included vendor growth schemes to raised place women-led oil and gasoline companies for business alternatives, methods to lift consciousness of obtainable financing choices, and potential affirmative procurement measures designed to broaden the participation of women-owned corporations throughout the oil and gasoline worth chain.

The UN official counseled NCDMB for its ongoing gender inclusion efforts, noting that the Board is already implementing a number of measures per its mandate. She proposed conducting a research to determine the explanations girls face challenges in accessing the financing facility, together with potential obstacles associated to documentation, enterprise registration, tax compliance, and restricted consciousness.

She additional highlighted key initiatives at present being undertaken by the UN Office, akin to packages on girls’s financial empowerment, management growth, and the elimination of gender-based violence, amongst others.

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NCDMB’s General Manager of Corporate Communications, Dr. Obinna Ezeobi, welcomed the proposals and affirmed the Board’s readiness to associate with UN Women. He highlighted a number of progressive initiatives already carried out by the Board to create alternatives for ladies to take part, develop, and lead in Nigeria’s oil and gasoline business.

These embody the institution of a devoted funding scheme with NEXIM Bank that permits women-owned or women-led companies to entry financing at a extremely aggressive 5% rate of interest, in addition to the creation of a Diversity Sectoral Working Group inside the Nigerian Content Consultative Forum (NCCF), designed to mainstream girls’s points into native content material coverage and decision-making processes.

The Board additionally helps associations of girls who work throughout the Energy Industry worth chain, the place they community, construct confidence and hyperlinks to progress their careers or companies.

Dr. Ezeobi famous that NCDMB has additionally invested considerably in capacity-building packages for ladies entrepreneurs and enterprise leaders, masking important areas akin to enterprise sustainability, company governance, and strategic administration.

The Board has additional supported girls’s participation in technical occupations whereas encouraging younger ladies to pursue careers in science, know-how, engineering, and arithmetic (STEM).

He acknowledged that girls stay underrepresented within the oil and gasoline business, citing restricted entry to technical schooling, finance, and industrial alternatives, in addition to entrenched perceptions of the sector as predominantly male.

Dr. Ezeobi reaffirmed NCDMB’s willingness to collaborate with UN Women to handle these challenges and advisable methods to speed up the Board’s help for UN Women’s programmes, thereby advancing gender inclusion throughout the business.

NOP NIGERIA