Celebrating Women Campaigners

International Women’s Day is coming up (March 8^th), in a tradition started in 1910 after Clara Zetkin, a German activist, called for such a day to mark women’s working conditions. The first International Women’s Day was held in four western European countries in 1911. Since then it’s clearly grown, and is an opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements.  It’s now even an official holiday in many countries -  Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Madagascar (for women only), Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia.

It wasn’t until 1977 however, that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women's Rights and International Peace that could be observed on any day of the year by Member States. The UN called for women’s role in peace building to be recognized and for an end to all forms of gender discrimination.

IWT started with women realizing the need to campaign for rights, and this need hasn’t gone away. This month’s Amnesty International magazine highlights a number of women who are fighting for human rights (www.amnesty.org.uk).

Jestina Mukoko is the national director of the Zimbabwean Peace Project. It has 420 community-based field workers, and the aim is to monitor political violence. She herself was tortured and detained for three weeks in a maximum-security prison in the violent elections of 2008, when 200 people were killed, 10,000 injured and 28,000 displaced from their homes. Despite her horrendous treatment, she carries on campaigning, asserting that “The role of civil society is to continually remind government that our constitution gives us rights, and we must be able to enjoy them”.  (Thus Human Rights Watch has recently queried the spending of a reputed $1million on the 90^th birthday celebrations of Robert Mugabe!) (http://www.hrw.org/home)

Manizha Naderi is the executive director of Women for Afghan Women. In 2006 she started to open refugees for abused women, many of whom previously had only prison to take shelter in. Now WAW also provides family guidance centres, homes for children whose mothers are in prison, and campaigns on issues such as child marriage.  Clearly Afghanistan is not an easy place to be a women’s rights activist!

Maryam al-Khawaja works at the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, though she was forced into exile in 2010 but still campaigns for rights in this small Middle Eastern country (bahrainrights.com). “It’s about finding the cause that’s worth fighting for despite your fear”. She and her sister Zainab are featured in the documentary We Are the Giant (wearethegiant.com) which shows the non-violent resistance of activists in Syria, Bahrain and Libya.

Monica Roa campaigns for women’s’ sexual and reproductive rights in Colombia; her work led to changes in the abortion laws, finally allowing women an abortion if their life was in danger or if they had been raped. As a lawyer working for Women’s Link Worldwide, she has been subjected to death threats, intimidation and break-ins.

Other activists highlighted are Sanya Eknaligoda, campaigning for rights in Sri Lanka after all the ‘disappearances”; Yorm Bopha, a housing rights activist in Cambodia; Liu Xia in China, an artist under house arrest after her husband criticized the government.

These are just a few of the women bravely acting “Even if we lose our lives”. (http://iceandfire.co.uk/even-if-we-lose-our-lives-london/)

I’m not sure that I could be that brave.

Another brave activist in the UK is 17-year-old Fahma Mohamed who is campaigning to get everyone to sign a petition calling on the Education Secretary Michael Gove, to highlight the practice of female genital mutilation. Fahma wants all head teachers to train and inform all teachers on the horrors of this practice, given that an estimated 66,000 girls and women have been subjected to FGM in the UK. Girls are not only mutilated in the UK but are also sent away during the school holidays to undergo the process. A couple of weeks ago, on the 8^th February, the Scottish education secretary Michael Russell said he would write to all Scottish head teachers warning them of the risks of FGM and pointing out the warning signs that it was about to happen. Whilst Fahma congratulated Scotland on taking action, she noted that Westminster has so far not responded to the campaign, despite questions directed at it by the Guardian’s ‘end fgm’ campaign (theguardian.com/end-fgm).

Other anti-fgm activists, Leyla Hussein and Nimko Ali, who founded the campaigning group Daughter of Eve comment how strange it is that an education secretary does not seem to be concerned about the social welfare of girls.

Despite FGM being illegal in Britain since 1985, with new legislation in 2003 making it illegal to take a child out of the UK for the purposes of cutting (with a 14 years prison sentence), there has not yet been one single conviction. An estimated 24,000 girls are at risk in the UK; in Scotland for example, the African population has increased from 22,049 in 2001 to 46,742 now, and there are many reports of girls being cut there, as well as in Bristol, London, Birmingham – in fact anywhere where large numbers of people from ethnic minorities are found. The increased costs of air travel has also been part of the trend for cutters to come to the UK rather than girls being flown to their countries of family origin.

An estimated 6000 girls are cut somewhere in the world every day and 130 million women are living with the effects of being mutilated. It’s a deep-seated practice, signifying massive sexual inequality and a gross violation of women’s rights. It’s still hugely prevalent though – in Somalia the prevalence is 97.9%, Sierra Leone 94%, Egypt 91.1%. 

Progress towards eradication is painfully slow. France, with its zero tolerance approach, has imprisoned 100 people, in 40 trials. There, parents are regarded as accomplices. One lawyer, Linda Weil-Curiel has been working to bring cutters and parents to justice.  She notoriously said “Can you imagine the outcry if this was happening to white, blonde girls?” and refuted the claims of those who say it is a ‘cultural practice’ – “children have a fundamental right not to be mutilated”.  The UN called for Zero Tolerance of FGM on 6 February this year – better late than never, perhaps.

Scotland has a Detective Chief Superintendent as the officer in charge of combatting FGM, Gill Imery. She is, she says, absolutely clear that this is a crime, that it’s child abuse.  

 Warshan Shire, London’s first young poet laureate has also lent her support recently to Fahma Mohamed’s campaign, writing a new poem “Girls”, which complements her previous poem written when members of her Somali family were sent away to be mutilated, “The Things we Lost in the Summer”.

That there are women in powerful positions, with a voice to make demands and also the ability to carry out actions, is clearly part of the battle in making headway on women’s rights. It’s not only important to have women in powerful positions for the sake of women’s rights however – when women are in powerful places, they can make a difference to all sorts of policies and practices and thus become part of making the world a safer, more peaceful, more health promoting place. For the first time, four European countries have women in the role of Defence Ministers, in the form of Ursula von der Leyen (Germany), Ine Eriksen Soreide (Norway), Karin Enstrom (Sweden) and Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert (The Netherlands). In my view, to quote one tweet, “That’s how global peace can be reached”.

Lloyds Banking Group has also just called for a numerical target, for women to fill 40% of the top 5,000 roles in the bailed-out bank by 2020.  The campaigner Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton fund managers, who set up the 30% Club, calling for more women in boardrooms, has welcomed the Lloyds target, though I cannot help but be cynical about the banking sector wanting to repair its reputation. Let’s wait and see what happens in terms of meeting the 40% target.

Everyday Sexism is still rife, as shown by the website of that name, set up by the activist Laura Bates (http://everydaysexism.com/). Having women in key positions must surely challenge this everyday sexism, so it’s ominous that so many high profile women seem recently to have had their positions terminated by the current UK government.  Diana Warwick from the Human Tissue Authority, and Lisa Jardine from the lead role of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority have recently had their contracts terminated.  Although Lisa Jardine and others campaigned to save the HFEA, she was told not to reapply for her job. Dame Liz Forgan from the Arts Council, Dame Suzi Leather from the Charity Commission, Lady Andrews from English Heritage, have all been stood down and replaced by Tory men.  Anne Watts, chair of the independent NHS Appointments Commission (which selects and trains people as chairs and non-execs to NHS Boards) was more or less fired when the Commission was abolished. Sally Morgan was sacked from her role leading Ofsted, with Michael Gove wanting to replace her with another Tory male, a banker. All these roles are meant to be independent of government, kept at arm’s length in the cause of fairness.

On 7 February, Detective Chief Superintendent Keith Niven, who has the sexual offences and child abuse brief for the Metropolitan Police, has criticized the Department for Education for not taking action on female genital mutilation, saying “it’s not happening”. Finally on 11 February, the Education Secretary Michael Gove agreed to meet Fahma Mohamed – not that it’s happened yet, but maybe it took a senior man (DCS Keith Niven) to shame Gove into some kind of action.  Watch that (male) space.

Nigeria - the Giant of Africa?

I’ve just returned from a short trip to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. It’s an interesting time to visit, given that Nigeria has just been identified as one of the ‘MINT’ countries, (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) hailed as the next ‘powerhouses’ after the BRICs and CIVETs, as economies to watch. Although I was familiar with Nigeria’s south west, around Ibadan, the political capital of Abuja is somewhere I hadn’t previously visited – so it was indeed a treat to see it at last. The hospitality given to us was, as ever, as warm as the west African sunshine and we were treated like VIPs.  Thanks to everyone involved for such a wonderful visit.

That Nigeria is joining a coterie of countries with emerging strong economies was greeted with headlines such as: “Where millionaires live on potholed streets that flood”, in The Guardian.  The article continues by suggesting that Nigeria’s growth has failed to radiate: “Tucked behind high walls, there are more millionaires living in this part of Lagos (Ikoyi) than anywhere in Africa, and most cities of the world. But the potholes are some of the city’s worst and flooding caused by blocked drains quickly turns roads into rivers, where sometimes barefooted fruit-sellers can be seen wading through with baskets on their heads”.  Certainly Nigeria is a country of contrasts and contradictions: although it’s coming to rival South Africa as Africa’s largest economy, two thirds of Nigerians live in what has been described as ‘crushing poverty’.  In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index of 2014, Nigeria fell nine places to 147^th out of 189 countries due to corruption and lack of transparency and Nigerians themselves say that getting on in the economy is all about ‘knowing someone’.

Ruchir Sharma of the Morgan Stanley Bank, in his  new book “The Breakout Nations” argues that Nigeria has ‘turned a corner’, yet Obadiah Mailafia, an economist writing in the Nigerian newspaper BusinessDay (3/2/14)  says that “Our public institutions remain weak while the political elites remain fractious. Our infrastructures are shambolic. The role of law remains weak”.

Many of our Leeds Met PhD students are wading in bravely to address key issues such as these affecting Nigeria’s economic and social wellbeing. I was invited to Nigeria as the University’s Director of Postgraduate Research Students, along with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, (Prof. Andrew Slade), Dr. Martin Samy, the instigator of the Nigerian PhD programme, and eight other colleagues, to attend Leeds Metropolitan University Faculty of Business and Law’s conference for their Nigerian PhD students. The aim was for these PhD students to present their work to date.  The conference was made possible by the generous support of the Niger Delta Development Commission and we were privileged to have the attendance of the Managing Director of the NDDC, Sir Bassey Dan Abia, as well as Dr. Itotenaan Henry Ogiri, one of its executive directors, who recently completed his PhD at Leeds Met. As well as the PhD students, the conference was attended by their Nigerian supervisors, and a range of other esteemed guests, including Senator Emmanuel Edesiri Aguariawoda, who represents part of the Delta Region.

One of my pleasant though nerve wracking tasks was to judge the best PhD student presentation, along with Professor Bankole Sodipo and Professor Sheriffdean Tella. We all agreed on the winners out of the twenty presenters – though we had to award two prizes rather than one. These were to Heineken Lokpobiri, a Senator in his day job, who was looking at Environmental Rights in the Niger Delta, and Williams Makinde, an executive director with Daar Communications, looking at the supply/demand gap challenge facing small and medium enterprises in agribusiness.

Senator Lokpobiri is taking on one of the most serious issues to affect Nigeria over the last 60 years – the effect on the peoples of the Delta of oil and gas exploration. The government has responded harshly in the past to the protesters. It led to the death of the writer and environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa who was hanged by the government in 1995 along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. This act led to international outrage, and Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth for three years. The fact that it is now permissible to question the enforceability of environmental rights shows how much Nigeria has changed politically. Indeed, the Niger Delta Development Commission seems determined to further address the social and environmental agenda of the region.  Heineken Lokpobiri spoke in his presentation of the “unimaginable environmental damage” and of the need to reform environmental laws which were “obsolete, inadequate and unenforceable”. His contribution will be to develop a legal framework to guarantee the efficient practice of environmental rights and enforcement.

Williams Makinde’s PhD addresses another key aspect of poverty alleviation - the lack of access to financing for small farmers, which affects the ability of agribusiness SMEs to develop and thus to fill the ‘missing middle’ in Nigeria’s agro-industry value chain.  Small-scale farmers play a vital role in contributing to Nigeria’s GDP yet only 18% have access to financial services such as credit schemes.  This study will look at what kinds of financial products should be designed and how small farmers can qualify for credit schemes, along with redefining farm land titles from a legal point of view so that land can be used as collateral.

It’s not possible here to mention all the other PhD projects, but they address essential aspects of Nigeria’s continuing development, such as citizen participation in constitution making, land rights, entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, environmental accounting, reform of the banking sector, the role of privatization, urban growth, and the socio-political determinants of terrorism. What they have in common is making Nigeria a more secure, prosperous country, and as we know, this is what builds the social determinants of health.

I had the opportunity to give a conference address and as so many PhD students had shared their experience, I started by briefly sharing mine. My PhD work was on the delivery of the universal primary education policy in Botswana, where I was living in the 1970s. PhD study has changed greatly  in the intervening years: then it was very much about individual interests, there wasn’t much emphasis on dissemination and it was a rather academic exercise.  Doing a PhD belonged to an exclusive club. Now, I argued, PhDs need to be positioned at “the points where education, training, research, work and career development intersect.” (Cumming, 2010). There’s much more focus on application and on meeting policy objectives, of feeding in recommendations made by in the dissertation to enable action to be taken. It’s no longer merely an academic exercise and no longer available only to the few. It was great to see so many Nigerian senior employees undertaking their studies, people with many years of experience, as well as those at relatively junior stages of their career.

It's important to stress that, as the former ‘colonial masters’ of  Nigeria and many other African countries,  that we were coming as equal partners. The writer Binyavanga Wainana, says in ‘How not to write about Africa in 2012—a guide’, says that Africa will engage with those who address Africans as equals. Clearly there are power and privilege differentials, much of it attached to ‘whiteness’ but we hope that Leeds Met’s involvement is in the spirit of support rather than of being neo-colonialist. We are responding to the clear needs of Nigeria and of Africa generally, which bears the majority of the world’s disease burden and has not made the developmental gains expected by the Millennium Development Goals. To quote Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you are on the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.’ Nigeria is not a mouse, but I hope you get the point.

As a University with strong moral concerns, we cannot be neutral, and with our existing links to many African countries, it seems a natural continent on which to support the development of PhD scholars who can address their country’s concerns. This development is necessary to challenge the Eurocentricity of much theory and philosophy; Bryceson (2012:300) speaking of ‘development’ generally, argues that, “the most effective way of challenging external donors agencies’ misguided influence, Western or indeed also eastern in the near future, is for theoretical agency to be grounded in Africa”. It was good to see our PhD scholars questioning the applicability of western theories to the African situation. Thus Dr. Henry Ogiri, who was recently awarded his PhD by Leeds Met, talked about rejecting stakeholder theory in his examination of corporate social responsibility formulation and implementation, and developing legitimacy theory instead. His work is concerned, essentially, with the ethical behavior of Nigerians firms, and argues that these should conform to international standards. Indeed, it is only in this way that Nigeria will be taken seriously by the international community, thus attracting the investment that Nigeria needs to increase the economic and social health and wellbeing of its people.  Henry is following in the line of other Nigerians and Africans who have questioned the value of western theory and instead are developing ‘theoretical agency grounded in Africa’. One Nigerian who massively affected my thinking on this issue is the Nigerian feminist and social anthropologist Ifi Amadiume, who said that it was for Nigerians to write about and analyze Nigerian culture, not outsiders who possibly would never understand that culture. She continues to write and discuss and I’d recommend her work if you haven’t come across it yet.

Having theoretical agency and keeping Nigerian talent at home means that Nigeria stands more chance of developing in the way that it wants rather than mimicking development in the global North or neglecting its people in the emphasis on economic development. The great Ghanaian leader, the first President of the first African country to break free from British colonialism, said “We shall measure our progress by the improvement in the health of our people. The welfare of our people is our chief pride, and it is by this that we ask to be judged.”

Another great Ghanaian, Kofi Annan, when he was UN Secretary General, said something similar: “A healthy and prosperous society is not just about attainment of numerical benchmarks, but it also requires investment in people - their health, their education and their security. It takes care of all and allows all of its members to participate in decision making.”

Thus perhaps in the way that our PhD students are questioning how to bring about ‘development’, there is room for discussion of ‘development’ actually means.

The PhD programme, I suggested, means that brain gain doesn’t lead to brain drain, which is an accompanying risk of  higher education undertaken overseas. Although students can be exposed to all sorts useful ideas abroad, many do not return.  (The diaspora can and does, play an important role. See for example, http://www.meetup.com/Nigerianthinkers/). I raised the question of whether the same outcomes can be achieved by studying locally, and I think they can. (See Dixey 2012).  Moreover, having groups of students working on related areas can lead to the critical mass needed to tackle these ‘wicked’ problems. Examples could be women’s roles in business, trading and access to credit; the skills-gap that is fuelling unemployment, especially among young people; the digital divide and how poorer communities can access new technologies; examining household expenditure at different income levels to understand how poorer households budget; monitoring the effect of electrification and “Light-Up Nigeria”; the list is endless. But if say, ten to twenty PhD students were all working on different aspects of the same problem, real advances could be made.

One example of a serious problem affecting Nigeria is that of road safety. It’s an issue that no one seems to be addressing, and the way that new roads are being built might only be adding to the carnage. Nigeria has the third highest rate of road fatalities in the world. In 2012, there were 4,260 road deaths, and with the number of cars set to rise from 8 million (most of them seem to be in Abuja!) to 40 million by 2020, the situation will only get worse. I did a very small piece of research around Ibadan between 1992 and 1994, where I was intrigued by seeing so many motorcyclists not bothering to wear cycle helmets. My line of enquiry led me to interview babalawo (Ifa priests) and a whole range of other people, and led to an fascinating (at least to me) exploration of cultural beliefs, fatalism and religion, leading to a single paper (Dixey 1999). How much powerful it would be to have up to a dozen PhD students all working on Nigeria’s road safety problem, with road engineers, urban designers, psychologists, education specialists, safety experts, car designers, sociologists, policy analysts, all taking their separate aspects but coming together to add to a holistic analysis and solution-finding. We saw incidents even in the few days that we spent in Abuja of near-collisions and one actual one with a four wheeled drive vehicle in the storm ditch and two cars parked nearby on the highway. These incidents can be more off-putting to foreign investors risking the lives of their staff on Nigeria’s roads than the activities of the Boko Haram Islamists in the northeast.

Nigeria is viewed by many Africans as the “Giant of Africa”, the senior brother. It has given the world an impressive list of Nigerian writers, thinkers, social scientists, and artists – see for example http://www.ranker.com/list/famous-authors-from-nigeria/reference

Nigeria is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of population (170 million). It has the seventh (some people say sixth) largest population in the world. It deserves to have the highest number of PhD holders in Africa.

References

Bryceson, D.F. (2012) Discovery and denial: Social science theory and interdisciplinarity in African Studies. African Affairs, 111, 443, April, 281-302

Cumming, J. (2010) Doctoral enterprise: A holistic conception of evolving practices and arrangements. Studies in Higher Education, 35, 25-39

Dixey, R. (1999) Fatalism, accident causation and prevention: Lessons for health promotion from a study in a Yoruba town, Nigeria. Health Education Research, 14,2, 197-208

Dixey, R. (2012) Delivering Creative Education for Health Promoters in Africa—Towards Critical Mass by “Going Global and Staying Local”. Creative Education 2012. Vol.3, Special Issue, 749-754