What Next After Saying #HappyWomensDay

Now that #InternationalWomensDay is over, do we go back to business as usual of ignoring the glaring challenges affecting girls and women around the world?

In Africa, do we go back to making women and little girls dance at airports when welcoming VIPs? Do we go back to physically intimidating women decision makers when they have a contrary view? Do we go back to expecting women to volunteer their labour while men demand money and even get paid? Do we go back to the majority of wives not knowing how much the husband earns? Do we go back to women not being allowed to preach in mainstream churches? Do we go back to most women waking up before dawn, the last to sleep and being considered "just housewives"? Do we go back to women not having access to land or owing properties? Do we go back to "accepting" that its kind of OK for women to be beaten and killed but get angry and make unwarranted jokes about women in general when its a male victim? Do we go back to our cowardice way of not interfering when a couple is violent? Do we go back to fewer women not earning fair wages? Do we go back to privileged daughters getting bursaries and poor girls loosing opportunities to study? Do we go back to sexually harassing women especially new interns in the work place? Do we go back to watching single women or grand mothers raise children on their own without offering help? Do we go back to pretending its none of our business when a little girl is defiled or married off?

And women, do we go back to gossiping, throwing shed and pulling another woman down? Do we go back to being too proud to ask for help? Do you go back to sitting in a salon seeing the need and refusing to get involved by disappearing in your magazine or phone?

Corporate sisters, how long will you continue enjoying the spotlight on your own without equipping others with skills and opportunities? When do we start mentoring and grooming successors?

To everyone, if you posted #HappyWomensDay then you also need to start thinking about how you will continue making women in and outside of your life "happy". Its not enough to thank women in your life for what they do or have done for you, the best expression of gratitude should be empowering girls and women so that the next G7, G20, Executive Leadership, Cabinet or Parliamentary portrait will have more than one or two or three women in it.