LAGOS, Nigeria — Through the largest demonstrations in Nigeria’s current historical past, 13 girls got here collectively to help their fellow residents risking their lives to march in opposition to police brutality.
The ladies had been all of their 20s and 30s. All on the prime of their fields. Many had by no means met in particular person. They discovered each other via social media months earlier than, and named their group the Feminist Coalition. They jokingly known as themselves “The Avengers.”
“We determined that if we don’t step in, the individuals who endure the best will find yourself being girls,” stated Odunayo Eweniyi, a 27-year-old tech entrepreneur and a founding member of the Feminist Coalition.
They raised a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} final yr over crowdfunding web sites to help the demonstrators who took to the streets to denounce human rights abuses by a police unit often called the Particular Anti-Theft Squad, or SARS. The Feminist Coalition supplied primary providers to the protesters: authorized help, emergency well being care meals, masks, raincoats. However when peaceable protesters had been shot by the navy, and the demonstrations wound down, the Feminist Coalition didn’t.
Now, their sights are set increased. They need equality for Nigerian girls, and they’re turning their focus to points like sexual violence, girls’s schooling, monetary equality and illustration in politics.
The battle for equality received’t be straightforward. A Gender and Equal Alternatives Invoice, first launched in 2010, has repeatedly been voted down by Nigeria’s male-dominated Senate.
After which there’s the matter of being proud feminists, in a rustic the place the phrase feminist is usually used as an insult.
For years, figuring out as a feminist in Nigeria has been fraught. The coalition’s choice to make use of the phrase within the group’s identify, and the feminine image of their yellow emblem, was pointed. Most of the protesters benefiting from their help had been males — and never all of them had been supportive of girls’s rights.
“We solely used the phrase as a result of we needed to allow them to know the place the cash is coming from,” Ms. Eweniyi stated.
We talked to a number of the girls behind the Feminist Coalition about why they joined and what they’re making an attempt to alter in Nigeria.
Oluwaseun Ayodeji Osowobi
Earlier than Oluwaseun Ayodeji Osowobi began her nonprofit group, Stand To Finish Rape, in 2014, it was frequent to open the newspaper in Nigeria and within the crime protection, discover a image of a kid rape sufferer, with no thought to how that public identification would possibly have an effect on her life. Girls had been raped and killed, with no penalties. Many well being care suppliers had no thought the best way to acquire proof of rape.
Ms. Osowobi, 30, is making an attempt to alter attitudes by altering public coverage and practices. Her nonprofit runs seminars to assist folks stop sexual violence, and a rape survivors community, the place survivors can share experiences, mentor one another and really feel much less alone. She’s labored on laws prohibiting sexual harassment and violence.
However males are often those selecting whether or not or to not go such laws.
“We’d like extra girls to get in these areas and make essential insurance policies and choices that amplify the voices of different folks,” Ms. Osowobi stated.
Tito Ovia
It was Tito Ovia’s nationwide youth service that made her understand she needed to work on public well being. Posted to Nigeria’s AIDS management company, she observed that due to a scarcity of information, it was onerous to inform if cash spent on stopping HIV/AIDS was making a distinction.
Ms. Ovia, 27, co-founded an organization with pals in 2016 that goals to attempt to make it possible for well being care throughout Africa is pushed by knowledge and know-how. The corporate, Helium Well being, has helped hospitals and clinics arrange digital medical data and hospital administration techniques.
She stated she hadn’t anticipated the work of the Feminist Coalition to be so severe, supporting protesters as they risked their lives to attempt to change a police system that brutalized younger folks.
“I believed it was going to be much more enjoyable than this, let me not lie,” she stated, laughing. “I believed we’d meet up, we’d drink, we’d bitch about males. We’d do some work. I didn’t know that lives can be threatened.”
Damilola Odufuwa
Earlier than the Feminist Coalition, Damilola Odufuwa, 30, arrange Wine and Whine, a help group for Nigerian girls.
She needed to create a protected and enjoyable area the place younger girls might get collectively, have a drink and complain about sexual harassment within the office, the stress to get married, the patriarchal system and its gatekeepers, and every other frustrations that they had — after which start to determine options.
Ms. Odufuwa, the top of public relations in Africa for a big cryptocurrency change, had just lately moved again to Lagos from the UK when she arrange Wine and Whine. She was struck by how girls had been handled in Nigeria.
She and her co-founder Odunayo Eweniyi — the identical duo behind the Feminist Coalition — made certain that Wine and Whine additionally wore its feminism as a badge of honor.
“We’re a feminist group,” Ms. Odufuwa advised a male discuss present host in a 2019 interview about Wine and Whine.
“Oh!” replied the host, sounding greatly surprised by her use of the phrase.
“We’re very feminist,” she responded, laughing. “Your response tells me that feminism is perceived as this unhealthy factor.”
Odunayo Eweniyi
Odunayo Eweniyi, a 27-year-old tech entrepreneur, didn’t understand fairly how massive a deal placing “feminist” within the group’s identify would become.
“It wasn’t presupposed to be a rallying cry for your complete motion,” she stated. “Actually, now that it’s, I’m very proud we used the phrase ‘feminist’ as a result of folks relate with it in a means that doesn’t equate the phrase ‘feminist’ to the phrase ‘terrorist.’”
Although Nigeria has a historical past of feminist actions, figuring out as a feminist is seen as radical.
Ms. Eweniyi just lately bought tattoos of her favourite equations: Schroëdinger’s equation, the golden ratio, and the uncertainty precept.
She’s working to scale back uncertainty in Nigerian girls’s lives.
The financial savings app start-up that Ms. Eweniyi launched in 2016, known as Piggyvest, tackles one of many major issues the Feminist Coalition has recognized — monetary equality for ladies. The concept is that individuals ought to be capable of save and make investments even small quantities of cash. It has greater than 2 million prospects — women and men.
Laila Johnson-Salami
As an anchor of one in all Nigeria’s largest TV information exhibits, Laila Johnson-Salami remembers vividly her male co-host telling a producer to say his identify first.
However she was undaunted. By Newsday, the present on the TV channel Come up, she stored Nigerians knowledgeable in regards to the protests, which adopted the hashtag #EndSARS.
At 24, she’s the youngest member of the coalition. Her major objective, she stated, is to draw a youthful viewers. And just lately she launched a podcast that will assist her obtain that.
She makes use of her platform to carry politicians to account, however stated, “If there’s one factor I do know for certain on this life, it’s that Laila won’t ever go into politics.”
The interviews Ms. Johnson-Salami does on the Damaged Report Podcast are very totally different from her tv interviews. They’re intimate chats on all the things from the significance of vulnerability to adoption and funding.
Fakhrriyyah Hashim
“Time’s up, it’s over,” tweeted Fakhrriyyah Hashim in February 2019. “You’re accomplished getting away with monstrosities in opposition to girls.”
Her tweet kicked off northern Nigeria’s #MeToo motion. In it, Ms. Hashim coined the hashtag #ArewaMeToo — Arewa means “north” in Hausa, a West African language spoken by most northern Nigerians.
In a extremely conservative area with what Ms. Hashim, 28, has known as a “tradition of silence,” #ArewaMeToo unleashed a deluge of testimonies about sexual violence. When it spilled off social media and into avenue protests, the Sultan of Sokoto, the best Islamic authority in Nigeria, banned it.
One other marketing campaign Ms. Hashim launched, #NorthNormal, pushed for Nigerian states to use legal guidelines that criminalize violence and broaden the definition of sexual violence.
Her girls’s rights activism has introduced her loss of life threats and abuse. Now, she’s put far between herself and the folks behind these threats, having taken up a fellowship on the African Management Centre in London.
The Feminist Coalition members had been all working from their houses due to the pandemic, so being in London throughout the #EndSARS protests, she was simply as capable of increase consciousness and funds on-line.
“I knew that no matter targets and aims we set, we had been going to realize that,” Ms. Hashim stated.
Karo Omu
An estimated two-thirds of Nigerian women and girls should not have entry to sanitary pads. They’ll’t afford them.
Karo Omu, 29, has been preventing to get pads and different sanitary merchandise to Nigerian ladies for the previous 4 years. She focuses on ladies in public colleges who come from low-income households, and ladies who’ve needed to flee their houses and reside in camps.
There are 2.7 million internally displaced folks in northeastern Nigeria because of the violent and uncontrolled insurgency waged by the Islamist group Boko Haram and its offshoots. And for a lot of girls and ladies residing within the camps, it’s a battle to get sufficient meals and clothes, not to mention costly sanitary pads.
Her group, Sanitary Assist for Nigerian Ladies, fingers out reusable pads, purchased with cash crowdfunded by Ms. Omu and her colleagues, in order that ladies have one much less factor to fret about. Among the ladies they’ve helped had by no means had a pad earlier than.
“Girls’s points are fought by girls,” she stated.
