What I want to achieve with WABIO —Mrs Nigeria

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8 years ago

In a bid to continue to touch the lives of women when her tenure as Mrs Nigeria United Nations ends this month, Ebele Enemchukwu launched a non-governmental organisation, Women Are Beautiful Inside and Out (WABIO), at The Civic Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos.

The NGO has the aim of championing the cause of women and girls.

According to the founder who has been involved in a lot of charity work since she won the Mrs Nigeria United Nations in 2016, WABIO is a vehicle to ensure that all the charity works she had done in the past one year do not come to an end. It is also a means of contributing her quota to the third and fifth Sustainable Development Goals of improving maternal health, promoting gender equality and empowering women.

The beauty queen stated that WABIO’s mission is to constantly remind women and girls that beauty transcends the physical, by churning out and engaging in programmes which encourage same. One of such programmes is the 2017 Breast Awareness Campaign.

In a an interaction with R, Ebele disclosed that the “foundation is not exclusively for breast cancer awareness alone. The project we are starting off with is the Breast Awareness, by the time we look at it in terms of awareness and reach out to women by giving out breast self examination kits. When we measure and realise that we have reached out to a considerable number of women, we will look at something else.”

“We are looking at the next couple of years. The moment that is settled, we move on to another thing. At the end of the day, we want every woman to feel beautiful. Breast cancer is a threat to that beauty, so, before it cuts us, we want to nip it in the bud. We want to do the proactive thing to make sure that it doesn’t catch us unawares. Early detection I believe saves life.’’

On the issue of funding, she posited that “as with most NGOs, the issue of funding is major and is not going to get easier considering the economic crunch. Also the fact that people and organisations are now weary of giving money to NGOs for the fear that they might use it to enrich themselves. We are hoping that with proven track record which will of course, come from excellent service and transparency, we will be able to reach out to other people who, seeing what we have done will want to identify with us.”