Speakers at the tweet-a-thon.

In the drive to increase the number of women who eventually emerge as elected officers in the country’s political space, the International Press Centre, (IPC) last week in Lagos organised a tweet-a-thon conference with the theme, ‘2015: Promoting female participation in elections’.
In his welcome address, Director of IPC, Mr. Lanre Arogundade, said the tweet-a-thon is a monthly activity supported by United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) Democratic Governance for Development (DGD) lll Project and its international partners including the European Union.

According to him, the theme was picked because of the myriad of challenges that womenfolk continue to face in the difficult terrain of politics, noting, “Despite the many campaigns for increased women participation in governance and elections in Nigeria as a step towards attaining the 35 percent affirmative action, their participation remains abysmally low. For instance, the 2011 general election recorded a lower percentage of women voted into elective offices with women occupying only 9 seats out of the 109 Senate seats while out of the 352 seats in the House of Representative only 24 seats are occupied by women. This unfortunate turn of event earned Nigeria 118th position out of 192 countries in terms of gender parity.”

He is, however, convinced that the media could do more and better in ensuring better women participation in politics.
In line with one of the objectives of the conference, he sued for active participation through using twitter handles to disseminate comments and observation during the presentations.

While speaking on the topic, ‘Media Role in Promoting Women Participation in Politics’, Head of News and Current Affairs, Africa Independent Television (AIT), Mrs. Ifeoma Oti, who noted that the primary role of the media is and will always be to inform, educate and entertain the people by providing them with fair, accurate and balanced information about activities taking place within and around them, maintained that the media must realize that despite constituting about half of the population, women still belong to the disadvantaged segment of society. This, to her, is why the media should therefore inculcate the promotion of women interests into their social responsibility during elections.

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