The urban dictionary defines emancipation as the act of freeing oneself from the custody of their parents or legal guardian and thus making transition to most aspects of adult life.
The big question here is why it is necessary? Because the literal concept of emancipation according to the aforementioned definition restrains everything to the efforts of the individual seeking emancipation.
We are not in any way going to temper with the concept of emancipation as depicted by the definition above because doing so on its own is a form of slavery, and neither are we saying that the Girl child doesn’t need guidance in her quest of achieving gender equality because if it was so then what exactly is the point of writing this article? What we are saying here is the girl child can be given the right enabling environment and proper education to oppose the wave of gender inequality and to advocate for gender equality.
For example in 2011, Abdallah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud the late king of Saudi Arabia granted women the right to vote. At the time women questioned whether they would be able to campaign for seats in local municipal councils, fast forward three years latter Saudi Arabian women voted for the first time on Saturday December 12th 2015. This was only possible due to the pressure for social and democratic reform which was mounted on the Middle East thanks to relentless advocates like Naila Attar who organized campaign for women to be allowed to participate in the municipal council election a move that marked the beginning of the whole process.
Clearly as seen in in the Saudi case emancipation here is giving women the privilege to even carry out advocacy campaigns on sensitive political matters because clearly it is the fundamental right of an individual to decide who governs them. Thus the campaign carried out by Naila Attar that became the game changer was unequivocally a great tool for emancipating women and girls.
However there are women and girls out there who are facing similar forms of social injustice but will not use the tools available to them to fight the unjust systems because they don’t even know how to do so, Emancipation here will mean teaching them to make maximum use of the available arsenals at their disposal, again parents must train their female children to speak when treated unjustly the culture of silence must be opposed, we must also get comfortable with more female policy makers, we must encourage and support women led campaigns and movements, finally we must see the emancipation of the girl child as a life time commitment.
Written by Fwangshak Ishaku-precious rubies Volunteer
