Samuel Ioron Foundation's EADB Project Empowers 300 Internally Displaced Women, Girls Living In Benue IDP Camps …C0NTINUE READING HERE >>>
The EADB project by the Samuel Ioron Foundation empowers 300 internally displaced women and girls living in IDP camps in Benue, Nigeria.
The project, formally launched on the 2nd of May, 2023 underscores our commitment to enhance the development of marginalized women and girls by providing informed knowledge that contributes to achieving higher standards through service.
We are creating a supportive environment that trains, uplifts, and empowers women and girls whilst closing the gap of gender marginalization and curbing violence against women and girls.
Women's and girls' rights are human rights. With the rise in gender-based violence and victimization of women and girls in diverse spaces, we are using art exhibitions, workshops, and voices to sensitize the inequalities that violate women and girls' rights. These and many others cut across the numerous initiatives which our organization is working relentlessly to combat.
Samuel Ioron Foundation-SIF is a nonprofit organization based in Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria, it was founded in 2012 by Ngunan Ioron ALOHO and was formerly named the Women of Change Initiative (WOCIP), but later renamed and registered in 2017 in honour of her late father, Samuel Ioron, to acknowledge his relentless contributions towards humanity.
The Organization works to increase educational access for girls living in disadvantaged communities, promoting inclusive qualitative and sustainable education and developing strategies for equal access to opportunities for women and girls in our community and beyond.
Thus, the Equal Access Database (EADB) project which is an upscale project of the Rural Urban Rightful (RU) Project aims to make powerful strides.
In 2020, through the RU project, we began investigating issues of sexual exploitation and trafficking with a focus on illegal migration. We conducted an environmental assessment and selected eleven IDPs between the ages of 11-18 to share their lived experiences at the camp.
We discovered that a lot of women and underage girls in vulnerable situations were susceptible to exploitation due to a lack of essential needs. It became important to investigate the experiences of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) as they are often marginalized communities with a high need for support and protection. IDPs may have little or no knowledge of the rights they possess, so exchanging sexual favours in return for essential supplies may seem a good deal to a number of them.
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The equal access database project aims to address the challenges caused by the displacement settling issue that arose out of the Fulani-Herdsmen Crisis in some communities in Benue State, Nigeria such as a proper database and management structure to monitor, track, and assess the residents living in internally displaced persons camps, create a whistleblower program to decentralize the existing power relations existing in camps and in addition empower women and girls with skills to build financial resilience.
Through the lessons learned from the Rural, Urban Rightful project activities such as the art exhibition and co-creation labs, we have discovered that co-design and co-creation workshops, training, and development activities are instrumental to target groups involved and engaging in projects, taking ownership. Through dialogue with the women and marketplace research, it found that women and girls who are skilled and have access to business opportunities will be better able to protect themselves against sexual exploitation and be more confident in reporting cases as the women will no longer depend on the camp managers or humanitarian officers for essential needs.
The Samuel Ioron Foundation believes that empowering women and girls is a powerful tool to change the world as it is a sustainable solution, creating earning opportunities, reducing sexual exploitation, and over-dependence on humanitarian aid by the marginalized communities.
The EADB 300-Women entrepreneurship clustering training answers the question of the easiest way to train a large number of stakeholders (i.e. women and girls) with limited resources in their access area or locality in a way that a positive impact can be made within a short time frame. Thus, the idea of training by clusters was birthed where each cluster contains 30 women and girls between the ages 15-30 years old, assigned to 10 vendors, and further split into teams of ten stakeholders each with assigned days of training weekly. This summarizes how we're able to accommodate 300 women to train effectively at the same time and using available resources.
From the co-creation workshop held at the beginning of the project with a cross-section of stakeholders, the skills of major interest to most of the stakeholders were pin-pointed, thus, seen as a scalable business identified three-skills set comprising tailoring, baking, and hairdressing.
THE JOURNEY SO FAR
The EADB project is in its first phase, a three-month training program that began on May 6th and will conclude on July 31st.
It has been heartwarming to see the positive impact on the stakeholders. Many are excited and believe that they have been given a new lease on life. Their confidence has grown, and there are already success stories emerging.
During regular monitoring and supervisory visits, we learned that two of our stakeholders had started a buns business after just four weeks of training. One of them, Luper Faith, a team leader, began with a “mudu” (approximately 1.5kg) of flour and other ingredients. She sold all her products, and her husband, impressed with her business acumen, provided funds to expand her business.
In hairdressing, some women have started taking customers. One of our hairdressing partners even trusts our trainees to run her salon successfully, allowing her to open a foodstuff vending spot nearby. In tailoring, women who had never sewn before can now use sewing machines, cut and sew simple gowns, and draw patterns confidently.
The stakeholders' confidence has grown significantly. Many express that they now have a voice, expect more from life, and see a brighter future ahead.
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