Stakeholders in the Nigerian oil and gas industry have charged women  to take advantage of the opportunities that the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) provides, to play active role in the industry.

They gave the charge while speaking on a panel at the 2022 Nigeria Women in Oil and Gas Conference, which held in Lagos with the theme,”Leveraging Opportunities for Women in the Oil and Gas Industry.”

The Founder/Executive Chairman of AA Holdings, Mr Austin Avuru, said that the PIA came at the time when most of the International Oil Companies (IOCs) are divesting their assets. To sustain the industry, he said that the key element will be education, training and competence.

Avuru noted that the Act expects the industry to have competent people to run it, adding that it is not going to be about gender, but about training, education and competence.

“Nothing has been wrong with our system in the work place. It’s all and has been and will always be about education, training and competence. Those who had the education, the training and the competence at the time we rose to our positions were much fair women because of the examples I just gave. And that is changing, not necessarily because of the advocacy — there is nothing wrong with the advocacy. That is changing because we are seeing more women getting educated. And therefore, they will get into those positions,” he said.

“If you look at the element of the PIA that will make it instrumental to progress in this industry, particularly PIA coming out at a time when we are seeing divestment of the majors; divestment would not have been a problem if they were not leaving with their training facilities. We are going to be looking for well-trained personnel in the industry — engineers, geologists, name it. We are going to be looking for competent people. We are going to be looking for well-educated people,” he stated.

“If there is any glass ceiling we are looking to break, that glass ceiling is about cultural issues that stop us from educating our girls; cultural issues that discriminate between boys and girls in terms of who gets priority in education,” Avuru added.

Also speaking on the panel, a board member of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Limited, Mrs. Lami Ahmed, said to mainstream women in the industry, the country needs policies and structure such as proposing  a bill to the National Assembly for the establishment of the Nigerian Women Content, to ensure that diversity and inclusion can be enforced and evaluated.

“The PIA has changed the landscape so to say, but we also said it is gender blind,” Ahmed said. “I think women should now begin to rise up and be strategic game-changers in the industry, instead of waiting to be the end-users. Because whenever you think about the oil and gas, naturally a woman will be thinking about cylinders she is going to use to cook. And then, when you are talking of having investment, she may be thinking of having few cylinders, refill, sell and make money. But we have so much opportunities in the industry.”

On her part, the National Coordinator, Women in Liquefied Petroleum Gas, Mrs Joy Shaiyen, opined that though the PIA is gender blind, the Federal Government can create more opportunities for women in the LPG space through Public Private Partnership (PPP), by building skid plants, supporting women in cylinder exchange business, adding that this policy will impact on the tertiary layer of the industry.

The President of Women in Energy Network (WIEN), Mrs. Funmi Ogbue, among others challenges,  identified funding as a key obstacle hindering women participation in the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

Represented by the Treasurer of WIEN, Temilola Achakobe,  she enjoined financiers to create a funding model that works for women to make it easier for women to access credit facility.

Lending his voice to the discussion, the Director of Finance & Personnel Management at the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB), Mr. Isaac Yalah, said that in addition to what the Board is doing to support the industry, in terms of providing funding, other financiers like commercial banks need to play active role in the industry.

In July 2021, the NCDMB in partnership with the Nigerian Export-Import Bank (NEXIM) began  the roll-out of a $40 million intervention fund for qualified women entrepreneurs in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. Yalah said that based on the current records, only fifteen applications have been received so far while three has been approved, adding that the Board  will work more on creating awareness about the fund.

“We all know also that funding, particularly in the oil and gas, is a very capital intensive project, very capital intensive, because it is very much dollar denominated. And I recall before coming in here I was just thinking when I recently saw the first quarter reports of commercial banks in Nigeria. All put together — first quarter alone, profit was close to a trillion naira. So if you multiply by four quarters, we are talking about almost four trillion . Now, let’s even take one percent of that four trillion or let’s say 2.5 percent of that four trillion, which is a very small significant part of it, that brings us to about a hundred billion. In dollar terms, we are talking about close to two hundred million, if I did the math correctly. If such kind of funding is being set aside, not looking at it only from the profitability angle, and we now collaborate and say ‘well, these are other funding agencies that have idle fund at a premium, let’s see how we can collaborate and create a funding scheme that can support this industry’, I think that’s going to take us a long way,” Yalah noted.

Similarly, the Managing Director of NEXIM Bank, Mr Abba Bello, said that the bank has done its best to water down the requirements before accessing the fund, just so that more women can benefit.

Represented by Mohammed Awami who is managing the fund at the bank, he reiterated that the fund is not a grant but a loan that must be paid back. Bello asked the women to always apply for the loan with all the necessary documents.

The panel session, which was moderated by the Legal Adviser to the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), Mrs Yemi Anyanechi, focused on the topic, “Creating an Enabling Operating Environment for Women in Oil and Gas Business  — Opportunities from the Petroleum Industry Act.”