Tayo Popoola, the Coordinator of Lagos Women Run, has called on women to support each other toward ensuring gender equity.
The women’s run coordinator said that the coming together of women to fight gender imbalance would also help in promoting wealth, being hospitable and creating happiness among them.
According to her, the ideals of the run is to promote tourism, hospitality, wealth, happiness and people coming together to understand one another.
“Women should look at themselves as role models and nation builders. If you look around you will see people coming to showcase their goods and services.
“The woman on the streets who sell plantain, even people selling sachet water are making brisk business and they are happy, for me that is what I call empowerment,” she said.
The 10km race took off from Tafawa Balewa Square and ended at the Teslim Balogun Stadium, Surulere.
“The 10km run is for women from all works of life and from different professional backgrounds, it is a means for women coming together for their wellbeing, to network and to talk against child abuse,” she said.
Popoola said that free cancer screening was introduced in the 2019 race which is the fourth edition.
“We will be unfair to women if we talk about women run without talking about free cancer screening, we noticed that there is an increase in cases of breast cancer, and we are trying to see how we can come in.
“Cancer is among one of the things we are trying to see how we can assist in curbing by creating awareness and giving free cancer screening, we have mammography machines to help people get tested so that they can know their status,” she said.
There are two categories of the women run; we have the open weight category and the veterans category, the open weight is from age 18 to 44, while the veterans are from age 45 and above.
In the open weight category, the first position got N750,000, second position N500,000 and third position N300,000, while in the veteran category first position got N300,000, second position N200,00 and third position N100,000.
Careen Cheptoek of Kenya won the 4th edition of the Lagos Women Run after returning a time of 28 minutes and some sec to win the race from Tafawa Balewa square to Teslim Balogun Stadium.
