Ebela Okoye during the event./ Photo: Harambee
Eduardo González. 07/03/2018
The Nigerian activist Ebele Okoye received, yesterday in Madrid, the Harambee Award 2018 to the Promotion and Equality of African Women for her work as director of AMAD, a programme for the educational, social and cultural development of women in her country.
“A few days ago, I read in the press that a network exploiting African women had been dismantled in Spain. It had lied to them to bring them here and they were kept as slaves. That happens every day in Nigeria”, Okoye declared during the event at the International Press Club.
According to the activist, born in the locality of Enugu (southeast of the country), daughter of a teacher and a nurse of the tribe Igbo and graduate in Pharmacy since 2002, “women are still the hidden resource that is completely unexplored”.
“There is no doubt that women can make a huge contribution to the national development and the economic progress, and they are a safe path towards the society’s sustainable development”, but, for that, “they need education that allows them to assume leadership functions”, Ebele Okoye, warned.
The NGO Harambee awards the activist Ebele Okoye for her educational work with Nigerian women
With that objective, the Nigerian NGO Women’s Board commissioned her the direction of AMAD, a programme for women to “develop the qualities and abilities that will allow them to be agents of the effective change in their environment” and “to play a decisive role in the national development”.
The programme, which tackles “real social problems, especially the fight against poverty and the lack of education”, has allowed “women that did not know how to read or write and for whom the only future was to work the land”, acquiring the necessary capacities to “lead their own businesses”.
During the event, the president of Harambee, Antonio Hernández Deus, highlighted that the objective of that award -sponsored by the René Furterer Laboratories– is “to support African people to assume the main role in Africa’s development”.
