Five Young females have been rewarded with $5,000 for winning the 2022 edition of the Social Impact Challenge competition.
The winners, Wilfred Emmanuella, Adeboh Hannah, Comfort Agbo, Gift Ononiwu, and Dorcas Jacob were rewarded with $1,000 each in the competition organised by YoungStars initiative.
The challenge is designed to help young women develop and enhance their self belief, aspirations and capacity to take on big dreams and develop it.
Speaking at the Female And More (FAM) Summit in Abuja, the Executive Director of YoungStars Initiative, Kingsley Bagwell said the winners were rewarded for their commitment to the 30-day reading and learning challenge, based on the point gathered and from their impactful projects.
He said “Today, we are here to celebrate women that have participated in our project, and to deepen the conversation of the theme which is ‘Every woman is a leader’ and to ask women to begin to self believe and express that leadership potential that is needed to contribute to nation building.
“We believe that women are just more than mothers, girlfriends, producers of children.
We believe in women huge progress, big dreams, big ideas and if they are well nurtured and developed, they should be able to participate and reach their fullest potential in any chosen carrier, be it politics, technology, space travel, fintech, business, banking and finance” he noted.
Bagwell further urged men to support women in boosting their self esteem in order to build a better society.
“I want men to understand that women are our partners in progress. it is not possible to truly develop your nation when you exclude their participation, gift, talent and expertise of half of your population. Women are half of the population of our nation, they have great managerial capacity, great negotiation skill, great resilience and we are denying that in our development process because we don’t allow them.
We are depriving the nation of those contribution which is seriously needed for us to develop our nation” the Executive Director stressed.
Some of the winners, Comfort Agbo and Hannah Adeboh noted that low self esteem have prevented so many women from exploring opportunities and taking up leadership positions in various sectors of the country’s economy.
They enjoin young girls to be believe in themselves as that is the major route out of low self esteem.
The winners of the competition also stressed the need to teach young girls early enough how to boost their self esteem so that they can defend themselves from abuse and all forms of societal barriers preventing them from attaining their developmental goals.
