By Laraba Jauro
Women advocates in Nigeria, like other women in the world, encounter numerous challenges in undertaking advocacy, especially in the country’s northern region. The women’s voices are not heard, and want to be heard. And their vulnerability is a high risk in society.
The United Nations declared 1975 through 1985 a “Decade for Women”. Four world conferences on women were held: Mexico City 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985 and 1995 Beijing. These conferences directed the searchlight on various issues affecting women’s status in society.
These issues, among others, include Violence against Women, Women’s Rights as Human Rights and Women’s Reproductive Health. It was not until then that the woman’s question entered the political agenda in Nigeria.
Various national development plans were gender-blind and gave no specific place to gender issues in Nigeria. These Conferences encouraged Nigerian women to come and form their Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to empower themselves.
Being a woman in Nigeria comes with deliberate discrimination, social, religious and economic inequality, misogyny and gender-based violence. Being a woman in Northern Nigeria sometimes comes with the aforementioned challenges.
Northern Nigeria is a diverse region with people from different groups, religions and cultural orientations towards women’s rights.
In an interview with executive Director Zenith of the Girl Child and Women Initiative Support, Aishatu Kabu Damboa, a gender equality activist in Maiduguri, said, according to the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, of the 7 million people affected by the insurgency in north-east Nigeria, about 1,750,000 are women and girls of childbearing age who need sexual and reproductive health services.
“Through my foundation, I worked on sensitisation programs on the prevention of SGBV and provision of re-washable menstrual sanitary pads at camps for internally displaced persons in Maiduguri. She is also actively working to support adolescent girls in IDP camps by providing access to vocational skills.”
She added that women and girls in Borno state, like any other place in Africa, deal with poverty, rape, domestic violence and gender discrimination, and there is a need to raise their voices for government to take necessary action.
She said being a woman advocate in Borno state and anywhere in the north is full of threats, insults and rejection. When men, and even some women, hear you mentioning equality for women and girls, they think you are starting a war with men.
Threats of physical violence, name-calling, trolling and online abuse come with the territory. The abuse used to hurt me, but then I understood that here in the community where I came from, it is not the norm for women to be outspoken.
Women in politics or who hold public office are called prostitutes. But she isn’t letting it get to her or stopping her from her mission of educating women and ensuring a gender-balanced society. I strongly believe in education. Our people must be educated; it is the long-term plan to change things.
However, she believes education is the key to lifting women and girls out of poverty. She said women are breaking the culture of silence, unlike their forebears who kept it to themselves and died in silence.
Being vocal about women’s rights on a public platform as a young Northern Muslim woman has a challenge in northern Nigeria. She also advised the government to ensure women representatives on every issue in Borno state. People should understand their aim and stop harassing women advocates in northern Nigeria at large.
Laraba Jauro wrote from the Department of Mass Communication, University of Maiduguri.