By Binta Jaiteh
The National Water and Electricity Company has launched a gender policy that seeks to address the unequal gender disparity in the energy sector by increasing the percentage of the women in technical areas complements.
The launching was held at NAWEC headquarters in Kanifing Municipality.
Speaking during the launch, Nani Jawara, managing director of NAWEC said: “there are many misconceptions around to gender and this has a direct impact on our perception towards gender policy that gender is only about women gender is not some concept imported from another country.”
“Gender is about identifying and tackling inequalities between specific group making sure that everyone man or woman can fulfil their potential and that is why gender is relevant to NAWEC,” he added.
According to him, NAWEC’s mission is to ensure safe, efficient and efficient provision of affordable nationwide electricity, water and sewage services to satisfy customer requirements and achieve a financially sound position that will contribute to the socio-economic development.
“Although we are only launching the gender policy the board and different departments of NAWEC have been working alongside with our partners to tackle identify gender gaps for the past last year. As part of our continuous work to implement our mission,” he disclosed.
Fatou Kinteh, Minister of Women, Children and Gender expressed happiness about the launch of the policy.
She said: “I am indeed impressed and amazed by the gender sensitive spirit of your institution in encouraging women in STEM to take up high technical positions such as Chemical Process Engineers.”
She commended NAWEC board of directors for adopting this new gender policy as it signifies their ongoing commitment to workplace equity and the integration of gender balance into NAWEC’s institutional structure.
Momodou Dampha, chairperson of gender committee described the launch as significant in the historic annals of NAWEC cooperation of governance gallery, adding “our gender or equality policy is simplified to be both reader and user friendly but rich in content and scope.
“The policy formulation exercise commenced in early 2021 through a tripartite combination of NAWEC’s HR and Legal Department as well as World Bank Gender Consultant template of other NAWEC policies was used as reference for purposes of harmony and consistency. The formulation of this policy is underpinned by the need to make NAWEC and equitable, diverse and inclusive workplace,” he said.
“However, we challenged ourselves that broke that jinx with this gender policy and an implementation framework guidelines and structures have been proposed most of which are already in place. The policy therefore provides the perfect framework for gender equality and mainstreaming in NAWEC’s business operations and activities with both its internal and external stakeholders adding that it is therefore applicable for employees, consultants, volunteers, partners and third-party service providers,” he added.