Red Cross distributes kits to vulnerable women in Niger

The Nigerian Red Cross Society has as part of its humanitarian activities, has once again touched the lives of the vulnerable groups through capacity building fund for the protection of gender and inclusion, distributed dignity kits.

The distribution exercise was done at the Old peoples’ Home, the Limawa Blind Centre and the Bosso Estate Orphanage Home, all in Minna, the Niger State capital, on Monday.

The dignity kits were distributed to women within the reproductive age of 15-45 yrs that will generally require them. The dignity kit contains a set of basic essential items that people needed in their day-to-day living, which includes toothbrushes, toothpaste, washing soap, detergents, bathing soap, slippers, torch lights, and reusable sanitary pads.

In an interview with journalists after the official flag-off of the distribution exercise, Officer in charge of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, from the department for the Protection, Gender and Inclusion at the Nigerian Red Cross Headquarters, Abuja, Mrs. Halima Momoh noted that the Nigeria Red Cross Society has branches in all the 36 states of the federation, stressing that they are having an assessment of a select few branches.

“We’re working with six branches in this particular project, to see how accessible our branches are to people with disabilities, how accessible they are to people with different levels of vulnerabilities.

“And also how we can scale up to see that we represent and that we include people with disabilities a lot more in our programming and our interventions.”

Mrs. Momoh further highlighted that the Society also targets people with disabilities because they know that these are people that are usually easily forgotten, and they want to include them, “like I said, we want to include them in our programming and our interventions to make sure that we have a holistic approach towards our activities,” Halima noted.

On the number of targeted audience, Mrs. Halima Momoh said that they are targeting six states for now, and the states are Kogi, Kaduna, Niger, Nasarawa, Benue, and Plateau.

In each of these branches, we’re distributing 110 dignity kits to people with disabilities within childbearing age and who are vulnerable; so each of the states have 110 dignity kits.

Part of the Red Cross activities, is usually to try and manage expectations and this is the first step in the approach to make sure that they’re including everybody and including especially people with disabilities, this is just the first step and we’re making sure that all our subsequent activities we include everybody.

The reason why the Red Cross is looking for people with vulnerabilities and disabilities according to her was to make sure that these are people that actually needed these items and people that will be able to make use of the items.

The Officer also informed journalists that the Society is going to have a post-distribution monitoring where it’ will come back to make sure that the items are being no no put to use, to ask questions and see how essential or how beneficial these items were or how the intervention activities were to the people.

She finally called on people with disabilities to form part of the volunteers in the nearest future.

Some of the beneficiaries who spoke to journalists after receipt of the kits, thanked and expressed their gratitude to the Nigerian Red Cross society for the presentation and promised to make judicious use of the items given to them.

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