Nigeria’s premier financial institution, First Bank of Nigeria Limited, has strengthened its resolve towards bridging gender gap in line with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals 5 which entails achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.
Confiance News gathered that this commitment was further solidified during the International Women’s Day (IWD) celebration where key executives of the bank among other guests gathered in Onikan, Lagos to celebrate gender inclusion of its workforce through its First Women Network (FWN).
According to the bank FWN is an initiative that seeks to address the gender gap and increase the participation of women at senior and executive levels.
The theme of this year’s IWD, #BreakTheBias, is apt in defining the banks gender equity policies which engenders appointment of women in most of its senior executive roles.
As part of activities marking the event, the participants at the event were engaged in painting and sipping creative art to signpost the beginning of the conversations around promoting a world free of gender bias and discrimination.
Reacting, Managing Director of the bank, Adesola Adeduntan, said, “Let me be honest with you, we have colleagues who are multi-talented, the quality of painting, I mean the colour mix and everything, it basically shows who we are. I just want to congratulate our female colleagues on this very auspicious occasion of International Women’s Day (IWD), it is something that is worthy of celebration.
“For any institution, for any organization, for any nation to thrive, the women and the men folks must work together to further the agenda of the institution and that is what we have been doing in the last six years that I have been at the helms of affairs in the bank, which is to create an enabling environment that will allow our female colleagues to be able to be the best they can ever be, and looking around today, I feel very proud that the agenda is not just an agenda, it is an agenda where we can turn around and boldly say that we are achieving the objective that we set out to achieve from the word go. So today, we are making significant progress from where we are in 2016, I have seen a significant number of our women occupying very strategic positions across the institution,” he continued.
More so, the chairperson of FWN, Olaitan Martins, reiterated the need to create an enabling environment for women in the workplace.
She said, “What we want to foster is a network where women are involved, where women are promoted, where women are developed, where women are put to the leadership position, where women are empowered, where women are bold enough to take charge. That is what we are trying to do with the First Women Network.
“The bank has been magnanimous enough to give us all the required support to move forward, today is International Women’s Day, and it is a great opportunity to celebrate our women and all other stakeholders in the society.”
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