The UN Women Country Representative to Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Comfort Lamptey, became a year older on 29 April. UN Women took to their Twitter account to thank her for her dedication, determination, and vision in making Nigeria a better and safer place for women and girls.

Comfort is a graduate of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom where she studied Political Science for her first degree and International Relations for her master’s degree. She is a gender expert and has served in international organisations promoting gender equality and ensuring that women and girls are being protected from violence. She served as a Senior Gender Advisor to the United Nations Mission in Liberia. Before that, she served as a Gender Advisor to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and in that capacity, she spearheaded the development of a Policy on Gender and Peacekeeping, the design of various guidelines and tools and also provided substantive oversight to the work of gender components in the UN DPKO-led missions.

Comfort has also worked with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a Regional Advisor in West Africa and as Senior Gender Advisor at the headquarters in Geneva. She supported UNHCR to develop, amongst others, a global programme of support on preventing and addressing sexual and gender-based violence in refugee settings.

Comfort stated in an interview that working on gender issues confirms for her the urgency of the relevance of the political perspective to be able to achieve gender equality. She said, ‘I do believe that in this life and whatever space one finds, you have a responsibility to leave that space better than how you found it. There is so much injustice in the world and there is so much injustice…against women, I believe that I have a responsibility as a woman who’s probably had it easier than most, but who, nevertheless, has experienced gender inequalities both in the personal as in the professional space, to work and contribute to building a more just society for women’.

Source: Twitter

Photo source: Twitter