In celebration of the 2025 International Women’s Day (IWD), the Run Club Abuja, in collaboration with different organisations, has held a 10 kilometer run for women based in Abuja.
Speaking at the event, Saturday, the chairwoman for the maiden edition of Abuja Women’s Run, Ibe Onyebuchi, said the reason for organising the run is to raise money to buy sanitary pads for over 500 ladies in five secondary schools of Abuja.
She said: “The target of the run is to build a community of women. We already have a community of runners in Run Club, but we’re trying to celebrate the International Women’s Day, which will hold on Saturday, March. Since it’s Ramadan, we had to move it to February to celebrate women. Most importantly, we’re going to use the funds raised from this to buy pads for 500 girls in five different government schools, that’s 100 girls per school, which we have selected.
“We’re going to repeat it from time to time. Hopefully, we’ll not be doing 500 women. We’ll be doing a thousand. For a first-time event for an existing club, I would say this is beautiful. I’ll rate the success 10 over 10 because we were sold out. We had about 500 ladies who registered. The truth of the matter is at the end of the day, we regretted it because we had over 200 ladies who also wanted to participate in this event and who also wanted to register.
“So at the end of the day, we’ll take records of how many people came and how many virtual runs we’re going to be having because people are actually running from different places right in Kaduna, Kano and Lagos. We’re going to be getting their records and sending their medals to them.
“There’s no age limit to the run. My younger daughter is 15 and she participated. We had a girl of eight or nine years who participated. We some white ladies, we had a lady of 70 years who participated, so there was no age restriction.
“As long as you know that you’re healthy and you can either run, walk or jog, you were actually welcome. We had our medical teams here for our first day to check in case anyone had any issue, but there’s no issue so far, so we are good.”
Speaking earlier, the founder of Run Club Abuja, Henry Okelue, said the exercise aims at raising 3 million naira to buy enough sanitary pads to last 500 girls for the next six months.
He said: “This means a lot to us. Women are the bedrock of society and as you know, next month is women’s month In a bid to celebrate our women, we decided to do this event and as you can see, it has been accepted widely. We are excited with the number of people that showed up.
They’ve had so much fun and the biggest part of it is that at the end of this event, the money that’s been raised will be used to provide sanitary pads for about 500 girls in selected public secondary schools in Abuja. Enough pads to last them for the next six months.
“It’s our own way of fighting period poverty and we hope that as we do this, in coming years, more women in Abuja will come out and join and the men will line the streets and hail them as they are completing their run.
“For the charity program, for the community service, we need about 3 million, which we are going to use to purchase sanitary pads. And we believe this will go as far as possible and give these girls that impetus to believe that they can be whatever they want to be without anything whatsoever hindering them.
“This is not a marathon, this is a 10 kilometer run. We believe exercise is part of wellness. When you exercise, it helps you with blood pressure, it helps you with all manner of illnesses and you will feel good with yourself.
“That’s why we decided rather than have an event where people are dancing, let’s have one where they are sweating, a 10 kilometer run which is not so much for people who run every time. For some of these people who have run today, this is their first time and we appreciate them coming out
“We have seen that more people, especially women, are embracing wellness. Every Saturday, we see more women coming out to jog, to walk, to do Zumba and any other thing that keeps them fit. So the wellness culture in Nigeria is growing and we are happy to see it.
“Hopefully, it becomes something that catches up, that everybody sees as fashion because once it becomes a fashion, it becomes what more people join. And when more people join it, they benefit from what you get from exercise. So it’s something that gives us a lot of joy.”
On her part, the Project Manager, Stephanie Adamu, advised other agencies to join the fight against period poverty.
“This event was pretty much very successful. It was above what we expected. We had a lot of people who really wanted to participate but unfortunately we had limited number and we sold out.
“This is just the maiden event and we are looking forward to greater and better events. We do hope that other agencies, other clubs will see it as a learning point for them to actually stand up and also embrace the fight against period poverty,” she said.
