By Ola Ajayi with agency reports
The convener of the Mary Dinah Foundation, a not for profit organisation focus with the task of preventing and treatment of malnutrition in the Sub-saharan Africa, Mary Dinah has said the reason behind the proposed Sahel exhibition in the House of commons in the United Kingdom is mainly for a widespread advocacy.
Dinah in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, said that it’s gives opportunity for members of the House of commons in the UK parliament and other international donors to support the Sahel.
According to her, “The Sahel exhibition is one that is very dear to us. So over the past 10, 20 years, we’ve taken images on the field in refugee camps and displaced locations and we wish the world could see this. The realities are just evoking. It evokes a lot of emotion and we always want the world to see this. We teamed up with an art gallery in the UK called Tafeta and with their creative guidance, out of 15,000 images that we had taken, we were able to select the ones that we felt just show more of the reality of what is going on in the field. And that became the Sahel exhibition.
“It’s a private collection of exclusive images of situations in conflict areas with women, with children.
It shows their resilience. It shows the issues but also the strength. I’m very excited to present it to the world.
Asked when the foundation started, she added, “We started in 2005 and we’ve been working on women empowerment, supporting children, protecting infants, eradicating, treating, preventing malnutrition, also connecting youths and women to gainful employment in terms of our employability programs. We’re doing a lot with pregnant and breastfeeding women. We’re connecting women to antenatal care. We’re also improving vaccinations and access to immunizations and vaccinations for children and we focus specifically on conflict regions. So as you can imagine the northeast of Nigeria has been involved in protracted conflict including terrorism for over 10 to 15 years now. The same as the far north of Cameroon where a lot of people from Nigeria you know fled into Cameroon and their refugees in Cameroon were operating in a refugee camp there and then also parts of Chad. Chad has undergone a confluence of complex issues over many years. So we’re supporting the most difficult of terrains around the world and we’re helping the people that need it the most.
“The Sahel region is across Nigeria, Niger, Bokinafaso, Mali, part of Senegal, Chad, Sudan , South Sudan it always portrayed in the news as poverty stricken area, where the terrorist are, where we always have conflicting issues, lack of education for the children among others that is what we want to bring to light beyond the headlines. There’s resilience in the women, there’s strength in the babies, there’s support from the government and there’s solidarity. There’s dreams for young men and women and we want the whole world to join us everyday to realise these dreams.
NAN reports reliably gathered that after the exhibition, there are plans to increase humanitarian support in Nigeria. “There’s a lot of issues going on in Taraba, Adamawa, Yobe region, Kogi, some part of Niger state, we are moving more into the middle belt of Nigeria and in Cameroon . We are in a refugee camp that hosts about 80 thousand Nigerian refugees in Cameroon . Despite the USAID being disbanded, we are one of the few foundations in the world that was kept by the Trump administration and they have doubled their support for Sub-saharan Africa”.
Article Why we ‘re taking malnutrition in Africa to UK’s House of commons – Dinah Live On NgGossips.
