About Four hundred and fifty women from five local governments in Lagos today received empowerment tools worth millions of naira after one year of extensive training on Financial literacy and independence.
The training under the Household Economic Strengthening and Resilience, HEAR, was facilitated by an NGO Humanity Foundation for Peace and Development, HUFFPED, with support from the French Embassy Fund.
At the grand empowerment held at Ikeja, representative of the French Embassy in Nigeria, Mr Pieue-Louis Bonnel, expressed delight that the distribution of the empowerment tools fell within the commemoration of International Women’s Day to make them economically empowered to be employers of labour.
While noting that the French Embassy is working with over twenty one NGOs in Nigeria to improve the standard of living of the masses, Mr Bonnel pledged continued commitment to bring more people out of poverty.
“The French Embassy has been supporting the projects of HUFFPED here in Lagos with what we call the French Embassy Fund for Civil Society Organizations and also capacity building for civil society organization”.
“So in 2024, 2025 and now 2026, the French embassy has been supporting more than 21 civil society organizations across Nigeria with projects that aimed at gender equality between men and women and economic empowerment of women and girls all across Nigeria.
Today it’s very important that I’m here because we are in the week in the aftermath of the 8th of March, the International Women’s Day.
So after months and months of projects, you can see and probably hear in the background noise, there’s tens and tens and tens of women gathered here today.
And we are here to celebrate them, celebrate how they have been economically empowered” Pieue-Louis said.
On his part, HUFFPED Executive Director Programmes, Mr Henry Adenigba, said monitoring and evaluation volunteers would take track on beneficiaries success story to motivate HUFFPED to do more for the less privileged in the society.
This program has been on for about a whole year.
There have been a lot of capacity building interventions.
There have been a lot of advice and others and amongst them also we have what we call community workers who are actually policing them to make sure that whatever is given to them today is properly utilized and so there will be monitoring and evaluation thereafter hoping to see that at least they are doing very well in whatever trades that they have chosen or vocations.
We are actually empowering them on what they are already into.
It is not a charity.
It is something that they have to make them work very well and be able to feed the family and lift them up for poverty” Adenigba said.
“We have what we have we have community volunteers who we have picked from every of the communities where they live who are actually monitoring them and giving us reports and every month”.
Advising beneficiaries on judicious use of tools received, HUFFPED Executive Director Finance and Admin, Mrs Adekemi Adeyeye, urged beneficiaries not to sell them but to boost their small scale businesses, hinting that community volunteers are in place to monitor the growth of beneficiaries businesses.
“My advice is what we are training them on.
Not to eat up the capital, but to expand the business.
So when we come for evaluation, we’ll be happy to do more” Adeyeye said.
“We have lots of equipment for beneficiaries they are Stoning machines, sewing machines, grinding machines, hair dressing equipment, foodstuff, countless things, so many of it.
For them, they continue their VSLA meeting, they continue our monitoring, and there are still other training we are still doing” Adeyeye hinted.
Some of the beneficiaries from Kosofe, Somolu, Ikorodu, Surulere,and Lagos Island expressed deep appreciation to the French Embassy Fund and HUFFPED for the privilege with a promise to grow their small businesses to support their families and immediate needs while sustaining the knowledge gained on financial literacy.
“We are immensely grateful for the opportunity and we have learnt a lot about how to save our money, we do contribution through VSVL and we have used the loans collected to boost our businesses.
We are grateful to HUFFPED and FEF.
Some of the empowerment tools distributed included sewing and stoning machines, make up kits, provisions, pedicure and manicure sets, hairdressing equipment, barbering tools, foodstuffs, drinks, water and baking materials among others.
Reporting by Yemisi Dada