Gender Inequality and Girl-Child Empowerment: Harnessing Portraiture as a Feasible Panacea

Ajayi, Olayemi & Seyi-Gbangbayau, Paul, Volume 3 Issue 2, December 2022 Pages 173-180, Published: 2022-12-20

Abstract

The position of the girl child is dire in Nigeria, where more than 63% of people live in poverty and there is rampant inequality in representation, injustice, rape, sexual abuse, despair, and other problems. Many female youngsters succumb to pressure that could damage their health or perhaps take their precious lives because of their unemployment, poverty, and illiteracy. In Nigeria, girls make up more than 60% of the children who are not in school, and additional girls continue to struggle with some sort of illiteracy. In order to mitigate the devastating repercussions of illiteracy on the nation and its economy, it is important to organize alternative methods that would raise the reading level among girl children. This study, which is based on liberal feminist philosophy, promotes portraiture, also known as portrait creation, as a useful profession for both girl and boy empowerment. Making portraits is a branch of drawing, which is a simple profession that can be utilized indiscriminately as a means of financial empowerment for both boys and girls. The results of this study hypothesized the effectiveness of using the Ke-O scaling smartphone application for a layperson to achieve portrait creation effortlessly using a studio experiment with 200 randomly selected students from all 5 schools in the Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro as a sample. The research made the most of the authors’ observations, a literature review, interviews, and studio experiments. It suggested, among other things, that the girl child be strengthened to be autonomous and literate in order to fulfil her divine purpose of complementing the boy child, which is essential to both domestic and international development