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A Champion for Nigeria's Rural Women   
Imo Sunday Isemin — Nigeria March 6, 2008—By the time Imo Sunday Isemin was 12, her parents had chosen a husband for her. Had she married him, Imo probably would still live by the restrictive customs of rural southern Nigeria, where women and girls have little control over what happens to them. “For women, it is quite restrictive growing up there,” Imo said. “You must go through this female circumcision process as a young girl; otherwise, you cannot get married. In my own time of going to school, the boys had more opportunity to go to school than the girls. Unless your parents are really forward-looking, they will not allow you to go to school beyond primary school.” Imo wanted to continue her education and she got her wish, thanks to a strong-willed mother who risked her own reputation and standing in the community to give her only daughter opportunities she had never known. Now, Imo is a successful businesswoman, a chief 23 times over and a national leader on women’s issues. She is a powerhouse who strives to help Nigerian girls and women escape the kind of systemic discrimination and male domination that traditionally has kept so many of them poor and powerless. “My mother insisted that I cannot go through the kind of life that she has gone through,” Imo said. Married at 12, Imo’s mother had half of her six children by the time she was 16. But it was not so simple. Once decisions had been made, wives and daughters were expected to abide by them. “And so when my mother objected,” Imo said, “people did not think well of her. They thought she was a rebel in objecting. But she stood her ground.” Imo’s mother sent her away, to the home of an uncle in a rural township. This came as a surprise to the family she was to marry into. “When they came to make the marriage, I was not there,” she recalled. Her uncle enrolled Imo, who is Protestant, in a Catholic convent school. Because he was an authority figure, the rest of the family was powerless to object – or to force her into marriage. Imo lived at school until she graduated at 17. Then, she said, she had “no other excuse” to avoid marriage. She considers herself lucky because her parents chose as her husband an “open-minded” man who had a university degree. He took his new wife to Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, and allowed her continue her education. Ultimately, she earned a master’s degree in economics. The couple has four daughters and two sons, all of them college graduates. Imo used her education to great advantage, and she wants to afford the same opportunity to other women and girls in Nigeria. She lives in Uyo, the capital of her native state, Akwa Ibom, and works with three non-governmental organizations. She is the national president of the UFORO Small Business Owners Association, which works to alleviate poverty and provide vocational and skills training – primarily to women, youth, disabled people and those living with HIV/AIDS – and to help members obtain start-up grants and market information. She also has leadership positions with the Nigerian Association of Women Entrepreneurs and the Federation of Akwa Ibom Women’s Associations. The association advocates for women’s rights and children’s rights, ending discrimination against women and trafficking in girls. One of the major challenges facing women is inheritance laws, Imo said. “When the husband dies, everything’s taken from the woman and she’s only left with the children,” she said. “However she’s going to look after the children does not concern the family.” A national law was supposed to change that, but it’s not enforced. So Imo is working to get state lawmakers to pass similar measures, with no success so far. Her different endeavors go hand in hand, Imo explained, because they enable vulnerable populations, particularly women, to escape repression and poverty and to stand on their own. As many as 80 percent of the people who receive training through UFORO are women, Imo said. “Women are the ones who suffer most,” she said. “In Nigeria, we say that poverty has a female face.”
In the fall of 2007, Imo attended CEDPA’s Global Women in Management workshop in Washington, D.C., which was sponsored by the ExxonMobil Foundation’s Educating Women and Girls Initiative. The intensive four-week course teaches skills in project management, decision-making, business development, proposal writing, advocacy, strategic communications and monitoring and evaluation. Imo said she will immediately apply lessons learned in becoming a better advocate. Although women in Nigeria had been fighting for laws on inheritance and children’s rights for years, they had “met a brick wall,” Imo said. “I have learned how I’m going to get around it. We’ve been taught that we can involve the men. The policymakers, who are men, will listen to their own men.” In her community, that will mean going to the chiefs, said Imo, who has been bestowed with multiple chieftain titles because of her community work and because her husband is a high-ranking chief. Her strategy, she said, will be to approach the highest of the chiefs. “He will now call these other chiefs. Whatever he tells them, that’s what they’ll do,” she said. “They will now be able to reach government on behalf of women. The government listens to them a lot. Read more about CEDPA's training programs. |
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