ME AND MY WORK: BUILDING NETWORKS FOR WOMEN, EMPOWERS THEM NMA ODI
BY Franca Ogbeh

August 1, 2004 - (Vanguard) Rural Women Empowerment Network (RUWEN) is a non-governmental organization formed as a result of the increased necessity to empower women at the grassroots level. It became necessary to sensitize, empower and educate women at the grassroots because of the flagrant abuses they have been subjected to.

Over the years, women at the grassroots level in some parts of the country resigned to fate, unable to complain loudly or seek any form of redress when their human rights were violated within the same culture from where the abuses emanate. These challenges and many more, RUWEN has risen to address. Ms. Nma Odi, the Executive Director, a native of Ebonyi State, also a Master's degree holder in Sociology, in this piece, explains the activities of the organization:

RURAL Women Empowerment Network (RUWEN) was established in 2001. But the vision came in 1996 when I was co-ordinating a Women In Nigeria project (WIN) and I could not do anything about it. So, I had to put the vision on hold until I was through with the project. When I could not continue any further, I decided to quit. I could not raise enough money to start the NGO and the people who were supposed to start it with me did not have enough funds as well so, I decided to work with Gender and Development for Action (GADA) for some months before RUWEN was established on paper.

Thereafter, we started writing proposals, soliciting for sponsors to enable us execute our projects. We were asked to do a project on the 'Role of Women in Curbing Political Violence' which is actually not in our area of interest, but we had to do it to get attention then. The first programme we did was to organize a conference on building partnerships and linkages for rural women empowerment, April 12, 2002 in Lagos.

The participants included the NGOs, the media and those who we thought could contribute meaningfully to what we should do in this jurisdiction. Thereafter, we started with a pilot state to test the vision before taking it to other states. So, we began with Ebonyi State. Now, we are involved in Women and Good Governance project in four local government areas there which was funded by Open Society Initiative for West Africa. We are also involved in Capacity-building for Women's Active Participation in Politics and Women's Rights Project in the four local governments.

Our goal is to make impact in a state or a local government, before we move to other local governments. Also, at the end of the projects, we will form a network of those who will take over from us when we leave. This, we have done in Ebonyi State. After forming a network, we also supported members financially and instructed them on what to do because the majority of them are not working.

In the course of working with rural women, I saw so many women who were actually looking for leadership.

They knew so many things but didn't know how to go about the things they knew and how to harness their skills to achieve their goals. Actually, they looked so hopeless. With the WIN project, we tried one way or the other to give hope but it was limited and there were so many bottlenecks as regards decision-making. I needed a platform that would have limited bottlenecks so that I can actually go out of my way to talk to these women; try to give them hope; to bring them together for us to work together.

The first thing you would hear when you meet a group of women will be, 'women are their worst enemies'. But from experience, I have found that women work more effectively when they are together. When we work collectively, we can achieve our goals. And the only thing you need to do is just to encourage them that we can actually love one another because men fight more than women do.

The only thing is that when it concerns sharing things or for a particular purpose, the men would put their differences aside, come together to achieve their goals. But women would emphasize on those things that divide us more than the things that unite us.

For example, when I was co-ordinating the Women in Nigeria project, we used to have leadership forum where all women leaders from all the groups would come together once every month to share experiences, to talk about our progress and constraints. In one of the meetings, one woman got up and pointed to a particular woman and said: "If this woman is in this meeting, I will leave". We asked her why? She said the woman snatched her husband some time ago and she will never forgive her.

We know that snatching someone else's husband for whatever reason is not nice, but we suspended that matter and continued with the meeting. However, the issue was later resolved and we forged ahead. From then, we saw ourselves as each other's keeper.

For example, we told them (rural women) that it is unconstitutional not to allow women to bail somebody from the police station. But I know that if they go as individuals, they would be denied the right to bail because the police may think they cannot quote the law and challenge them simply because they are uneducated. But we made them understand that when they go to the station in group to bail a person and the police refuse, they should start chanting at the station that it is their right to bail and that there is no law in the Police Act or Constitution that says women should not bail anybody. By the time they do this for sometime, the police would allow women have their way. We have tried this method and it worked for us.

High level of commitment

From experience I know that when you give such women instructions, they carry them out, unlike the urban or city women. With the latter, we found that the workshop actually ends the steam most of the time because many of them don't have the time and there is no high level of commitment. But in the rural areas, when you come to organize a workshop, they first of all test your sincerity.

I have been able to win their confidence. At the end of each workshop, they would not want me to leave because I go out of my way to ensure that they are given the best of everything. When I lived in Abakaliki, I would enter all the communities and do training for women or I would watch the trainers I have trained, train the women. I would sit back to watch their reactions. There is a community I entered, they did not even have any kind of women group except those who dance for people. So, I told them that every community has to give me a Rural Women Association and we formed four women groups in that state.

Recently, I travelled to Abakaliki and I was asking them what they were actually doing in the group. They said they are now stakeholders in their various communities and that they would not do anything without calling on the association because they have put their feet down to be recognized and they are working towards it.

They also told me that they get involved in development projects and they go out of their way to welcome anybody who is willing to talk about their problems. They visit members who have suffered any misfortune, buy them gifts and give them little money. That is what we teach them. We are involved in women empowerment, not marriage rascality. We teach them how to love their husbands and children. Each time we teach women a new approach on how to run their matrimonial homes happily, when they apply it, they will come to testify how it worked for them.

At present, RUWEN is in only one state, which is Ebonyi. We are in four local governments in that state, and we have trained women in 39 communities. We want them to mature before we leave them on their own completely or else, they will scatter. We focus more on the rural women because we discovered that women have political problems and we want to increase their representation in public offices.

We know women have need for capacity- building, we know they have social problems, health and financial problems, even socio-cultural, political and economic problems. We believe that the best way to solve these problems apart from teaching them, is building networks because we tested it and it worked.

From: http://allafrica.com/stories/200408020620.html