A gender-passionate Nongovernmental Organization, Gender and Development Action or GADA has commenced a program to ensure behaviour change in families, Marriages, communities, and relationships in Cross River and the South-South geopolitical zone.
GADA hopes to deploy this behavioural change in tackling the menace of gender-based violence by reviving values, culture, and cultural institutions to revive the communities and families using traditional Institutions.
Speaking on the sideline of an event in Calabar, Cross River, to celebrate the organisation’s first batch of Community Service Volunteers, Ambassador Nkoyo Toyo, the founder of GADA, decried the spate of violence within families, marriages and even communities, reinstating that no one, man or woman, is spared from the consequence of such activities.
Nkoyo, who is also the initiator of the GADA Traditional Marriage Relationship School, held that “There is a lot that is going on in our communities; we’re seeing that violence is coming into families, it used to be in communities and not so much in families, but it’s now entering into families. And once it’s crushing the family, then that is the end of the road because without families, there’s no community and no society.”
She added, “Our idea is about our values, culture, and the ways that we can revive them in very positively and make them inform the behavior changes we want to see. People are holding onto phones and inculcating values that are alien to their communities, it has become a competition.”
Nkoyo further added that “our cultural institutions [can] revive the communities and families as a counter-narrative to some of the violent things we are seeing, particularly amongst young people in marriage, relationships and out of marriage, through the traditional marriage councillors and facilitators. We have been on this for the last 6 months,” she said.
“We aim to work against Gender-Based Violence through this program. A lot has gone into it. If we infuse this communication we are talking about into marriages, we hope that it drives home success. We’re now building community support structures that will strengthen marriages and relationships. The Obong’s Council, the Muri of Efut, and the Ndidem of the Quos are all our stakeholders.”
Also speaking, Rev. Mrs Grace Ekanem, Director of the Better Life Program, mentioned that “GADA is doing just what we started by encouraging women who hadn’t gone to school to go back to school because we need to have education because that’s a basic need. Women were relegated behind because women earlier had no education. So now women can be counted as those who can contribute to the world.”
The initiative promotes actions to counter denigrating traditional behaviours that impact the personhood of community members.
