Of Naga women’s rights and role in Naga society

Staff Reporter
Dimapur, August 29 (EMN): Gender equality is a fundamental right and discrimination on the line of gender equality is violation of persons’ basic rights such as education and expression. It is a necessary piece in the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous world and its observation can help fuel economic growth and benefit societies, expressed Programme Director of Bethesda Youth Welfare Centre, Chumben Humtsoe in his keynote address.
Humtsoe was addressing the ‘State level consultation workshop on Naga woman rights and role in Naga society,’ organised by Bethesda Youth Welfare Centre in collaboration with North East Dialogue Forum on Tuesday at Circuit House, Dimapur.
Woman issue, he maintained, was recognised in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) with the main targets of the MDG 3 to ensure gender equality is achieved all across the world and particularly in most developing countries, where the culture is cemented.
While the programme has achieved some remarkable results especially since the turn of the century, a good number of women around the world are still subject to domestic violence and discrimination and statistics projected a possible upsurge in the coming years if the right measures are not immediately put in place. When the MDG was revised and made it to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Gender Equality and Girl and Women Empowerment was included as the fifth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 5), detailed Humtsoe.
“Women make up for a very vital part of our economic, social and political lives, but due to discrimination against them, their potentials and utility never get to be utilised fully in developing countries. If this SDG 5 and its targets gets to be achieved before 2030 and all women get equal chance and freedom to contribute to the development of their countries and by the end of the century more than half of the third world countries will have fully developed,” articulated the programme director. In order to achieve the SDG, he has suggested devising our own initiative as the outside world will not come to make it achieve the desire goal.
In this context, North East Dialogue Forum and the Bethesda Youth Welfare Centre have decided to conduct the workshop with the objective to identify the impact on Naga woman by Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) and minerals like oil and coal mining, to identify scopes and gap on accessibility by Naga woman of legal and customary set up, to identify social issues ways and means to address them, to identify the role of Naga woman towards Naga society and to identify issues for further in depth dialogue and research.