Nigeria ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985 without reservations. But few of its citizens have ever heard of the document. Day-to-day life for women in Nigeria is shaped less by international conventions than it is by the diverse cultures, traditions and religions found in the country.

Twenty-four years after ratification of CEDAW, early marriage - and with it, the end of many girls' education - is just one of the persisting obstacles to gender equality in Nigeria. Credit: Nicholas Reader/IRIN

Hauwa Usman* is a recently-widowed woman from Fanisau village near the northern Nigerian city of Kano. Slim and dark-skinned, this young woman’s face carries signs of long, exhausting emotional strain. She says she was born during the Murtala Muhammed regime, making her 33 or 34 – a little older than CEDAW.

Article 16 of CEDAW confirms that men and women have the same right to choose a spouse and to enter into marriage; it also says that the marriage of a child has no legal force – instead requiring that laws specifying a minimum age for marriage be passed.

About the time Nigeria ratified the convention, Usman was married off to a man 12 years her senior. From the time 10-year-old Hauwa moved into her marital home, her husband was a stern and distant presence, believing that his young bride – or any woman – would not respect him if he so much as smiled at her.

Usman says her deceased husband treated her like a slave; she was never asked her opinion on domestic matters, just given orders to do this, do that.

Usman has given birth to nine children, delivering all of them at home with the aid of her in laws and traditional birth attendants. Four of the births, she says, involved complications that almost cost her her life.

Like a good number of men in Nigeria’s north, her husband hated the idea of women visiting hospitals because they do not want their wives to be examined by male doctors, believing this is against their culture and religious beliefs. Whenever she fell ill, it required her husband’s friends’ pleading to be allowed to go to a clinic.

Usman believes her life would have been a very different story if she had gone to school instead of being married off so early to a husband she never loved. But she also believes Hausa culture frowns on a woman revealing her marital secrets, and she lived under hardship in silence through her marriage that terminated a year ago.

So where is the protection?

The closely-linked questions of girls’ education and early marriage are two of the most prominent issues put forward by campaigners in support of the implementation of CEDAW in Nigeria. Twenty-four years after ratification, the convention’s supporters are well aware of the obstacles to ending discrimination on these and other questions.

“(Even) if CEDAW is accepted and implemented at the federal level in Nigeria, it will certainly face opposition in the states, due to some provisions (which challenge) religious and cultural values. But the focus should be on how to deal with such opposition,” says Fatima Kwaku.

Kwaku was an active member of the CEDAW monitoring committee from 2001 to 2004 and has remained involved in holding government accountable. Herself a Muslim, and a barrister, she knew the opposition that the Convention would face on issues like marriage.

She stresses that CEDAW must be advocated with great care, so that people get the correct message and the intended changes in women’s status are acceptable amongst the people at the grassroots levels. This, she said, calls for the document and new laws passed to implement to be framed in such a way as to avoid unnecessary hostility from religious or other cultural forces without sacrificing their empowering content.

Aminu Ibrahim, also lawyer, has a more positive view of what CEDAW has accomplished in Nigeria.

“Women have become fully active in Nigerian politics, which was not the case before,” he offers as one example. “And there are so many non-governmental organisations advocating to women about family planning.”

He remarked that while the Convention might be well-suited to fighting discrimination against women on the global scale, its implementation was destined to be awkward in local situations, such as in Kano where he says the Hausa community – including what he terms its “naturally reserved women” – view with suspicion.

“Imagine Hausa women discussing about reproductive health or family planning issues when they are being oriented by NGOs. A woman hardly discusses her reproductive health with even her husband.”

Realism or resignation?

Ibrahim and Kwaku both seem to accept that many types of discrimination are too deeply entrenched to be tackled directly in the near future.

“The only option is to put those sections regarded as controversial on hold for the time being, and implement the remaining non-controversial sections. Half a loaf of bread is better than none, and with time things will change.” Kwaku says.

For CEDAW to take root in Nigeria, state and federal governments must show political will and commitment through allocating financial and human resources across sectors. CEDAW must also be seen as a social responsibility for all, rather than the governments alone.

“There must be full awareness creation to ensure acceptance and full utilisation of the convention at all levels. It is a critical challenge as far as the domestication process is concerned,” she says, stressing that it worries her that 24 years after ratification, CEDAW still seems as foreign as the country in which governments met to draft it.

“By now the word CEDAW should have been common even to the housewives in Nigeria, if it was regarded seriously by the governments,” said Kwaku. “It must be integrated into school curriculum so that the young will have the concept of non-discrimination imbibed into them,” said Kwaku.

No country has achieved 100 percent compliance, she says.  “Yet we the Nigerian women will remain optimistic about the success and full implementation of CEDAW in the near future.

Perhaps not soon enough for Hauwa Usman, whose childhood ended abruptly just as the Convention that should have guaranteed a ten-year-old girl time and space to grow was adopted.

Cowpeas are of vital importance to the diets and livelihood of millions of people in West and Central Africa. But the crop is notoriously difficult to store – beetles and other pests can destroy an entire granary full of cowpeas within 12 months.

In September, ten people died - twenty more were hospitalised - after eating beans contaminated by farmers in an attempt to protect them from pests in storage. Credit: Wikicommons

Rural families in Nigeria grow cowpeas for sale, for their own consumption and feed animals on the husk of the bean.

The black-eyed beans are known to contribute to soil fertility by providing ground cover and useful plant residues, fixing nitrogen, and suppressing weeds.

Cowpeas are an important staple food in northern Nigeria and beyond. Across the country the beans are made into a deep-fried dumpling (known in Hausa as kosai’, in Yoruba as akara). Another favourite is a pudding known as alala.

Cowpeas provide an inexpensive source of protein for both rural poor and urban consumers. Research by Ricardo Bressani in 1985 revealed that the grain contains about 25 percent protein and 64 percent carbohydrate and so it has a tremendous potential to contribute to the alleviation of malnutrition among resource-poor farmers.

A superb plant then.

Except that about twenty people were hospitalised and another ten died in just the month of September in just the northern Nigerian state of Kano, after eating beans contaminated by farmers in an attempt to protect them from pests in storage.

“We have a lot of cases of food poisoning due to chemical storage, leading to what is commonly called ‘killer beans’. Because many farmers don’t have functional storage facilities and do not receive the full value of their cowpea harvest,” said Dr Tahirou Abdoulaye, a representative of the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture. The IITA has developed a new, safe method of storage.

Ahmed Abubakar, a farmer at Gabasawa village about 130 kilometres from the city of Kano who has been growing cowpeas for years told IPS that he has been storing his beans using insecticides which he admitted were poisonous when misused.

He said officials from the Kano State Agriculture and Rural Development Agency had on many occasions informed him and other farmers in the area that the pesticides and insectides were harmful if used for food storage, but there was no alternative method to store the product.

He said that he sometimes stored the harvest in plastic bags, but that this failed to protect it.

The Institute of International Tropical Agriculture (IITA), has recently developed a new technology for storing cowpeas without chemicals.

Over the last two decades, the IITA has made significant advances in improving the productivity of cowpea in sub-Saharan Africa, developing a number of varieties with different maturity periods, ability to outcompete weeds, increased resistance to diseases and pests and other desirable agronomic traits.

But storage is a problem that threatens to erase any gains in productivity. Abubakar revealed that every year, he loses more than 1,000 kilos of his crop, which he usually seals off in the 50 kilogramme capacity bags.

Dr Abdoulaye says his institute will be rolling out a new method, known as the Purdue Improved Cowpea Storage (PICS), in Nigeria during the final quarter of 2009. The aim is to see at least half of all cowpeas stored using the new method across West and Central Africa by 2011.

PICS is a straightforward idea: seal the bags up in hermetically-sealed plastic that does not allow air in, limiting the survival of insects that damage cowpeas.

“This simply eliminates the need to use any chemicals for storage,” says Abdoulaye. Each PICS bag, which will be available from licensed vendors, consists of two high-density polyethylene plastic bags, and an outer sack of nylon that protects them.

Abdoulaye explains that any insects sealed in with the beans will quickly use up all the air in the sealed bag and then it can be stored safely for eight to 12 months without being damaged by insects.

Training on the use of the new technology will focus on women farmers, and a special demonstration would be conducted in villages just for the benefit of the women farmers, who take the lead in the most crucial phases of processing and preparing cowpeas, as well as storage.

It is expected that about 40 women technicians trained by the Institute will continue to work with women farmers across the 12 northern states of Nigeria to increase female farmers’ access to the technology.

Abdoulaye also said the project was developing a distribution network of PICS sacks in Nigeria, saying distribution will provide business opportunities to sack manufacturers, distributors and vendors.

The IITA official therefore revealed that the PICS project and its partners have identified with the efforts of National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control toward helping Nigerian consumers in getting safe cowpeas to eat.

Abdoulaye finally disclosed that to protect the users from getting the fake product, the institute only gave one accredited vendor the technology for production and sale, advising that farmers must obtain from the vendors to be sure of getting authentic and effective bags.

Hajiya Altine Abdullahi cut a chastened figure in February. She was planning a million-strong march of widows and orphans through the streets of the northern Nigerian city of Kano.

Until she was called in to a meeting with the powerful body tasked with monitoring compliance with Islamic law in Kano state, the Hisbah command.

“I have promised to desist from talking about the cancelled rally after the arguments of the Hisbah command helped me see the damage it would do to the community,” Abdullahi told IPS.

Abdullahi is the executive director of Voice of Widows, Divorcée and Orphans of Nigeria (VOWAN), a non-governmental organisation set up five years ago to address the problems faced by widows and divorced women in Kano State. It has since become a national group claiming about 17,000 members.

According to Abdullahi, VOWAN assists women with skills training and helps them to secure scholarships for their children.

It is common that during the first few months of a woman’s return to her parents, her family does its best to accommodate her, but the added burden of supporting a widow or divorcée and her children quickly wears out that welcome.

Shortly after VOWAN was formed in 2004, the members of the association paid a visit to the state House of Assembly where they lobbied for the adoption of a law that would focus on reducing the high rate of divorce in the state.

VOWAN demanded that measures to ensure that legal requirements around divorce be fulfilled.

In 2004, VOWAN strongly urged the state government to implement an empowerment scheme for divorcées and widows, or to assist them with funds from the public treasury to distribute to the widows and divorcées that registered with VOWAN.

They also said it should be made a social responsibility to care for orphans in the society, so they could access good education. VOWAN urged that government pay scholarships for registered orphans.

Five years later, VOWAN felt that their request had been ignored and announced th plan to march a one-million divorcées and widows through Kano’s streets on Jan. 29.

VOWAN is not the only group worried about the situation of divorced women. Kano State’s justice ministry conducted a study in 2006 that revealed that as many as 80 percent of marriages in Kano were not stable. The study, conducted under the authority of state attorney general Aliyu Umar put forward several reasons for this.

Reasons ranging from a communication problems to lack of education on the part of women side were responsible for the high divorce rates, in Umar’s view.

Early marriage often denies women the chance to complete their education. These young women are married to much older men who they relate to as a father or an elder brother and to whom they must show extreme respect.

Very few men in Kano will allow their wives go to either an Islamic or secular school to complete her education. Yet when they come across an educated woman, they are keen to marry them as a second wife.

The study indicated that in almost every home in the Kano, there is at least one divorcée returned to her parents or guardians, stressing that “this phenomenon contradicts the aspirations of the present administration which desires a better society.”

In December 2008, the Directorate for Social Re-orientation made a call to all couples in the state to eschew bitterness and rancor after realizing reasons like “misapplication of power by men to divorce women, to be responsible for the high divorce rates in the state.”

The directorate called for tolerance and patience over minor problems within marriages in order to save them from failing, because it was realized that extension and retention of minor problems such as sharing of responsibilities between the couple break homes easily.

The Director General, Malam Bala Muhammad, noted that the findings suggested that courts should give special consideration to marital cases, for example sending the couples for counseling and intervening on the issue of lack of fulfilling responsibilities especially from the men, in order to reduce rate of marital problems throughout the state.

The directorate has set up offices in each of the 44 local government areas of Kano, to settle marital disputes to reduce divorce rates, in addition to other family issues.

But when VOWAN announced the rally, some people – especially religiously-conscious people – were offended by the plan and began to advocate against it in mosques and elsewhere.

Even some women – both married and unmarried – were against the rally. It has never been witnessed in the Hausa community for women to be on the streets in the name of protest.

The state Hisbah command swiftly called the organisers to order. The commander of the women’s wing of the Hisbah, Malama Halima Shitu told IPS Hajiya Abdullahi is herself a member of the Hisbah, and she never contacted the command for advice before embarking on her rally.

“Most people did not know that she belonged to the Hisbah because she hides (her) identity with VOWAN. And being a Muslim from Kano made it necessary for the intervention of the Hisbah,” Shitu said.

“No one forced VOWAN to cancel the rally. Rather we wanted to know what she wanted to achieve by it. She mentioned that she was doing it to call people’s attention the number of widows on the street.

“We sat her down and underlined to her the religious implications of the damage she was about to do to women not only in Kano, but in the Muslim community as a whole. And before you know it, she was down on her knees voluntarily cursing her own actions.

“The Hausa community is known to be guided by Islamic norms, and the religion of Islam prohibits women from such acts as protests over issues that have already been ironed out by the religion, as I’m sure all religions have their norms too,” Shitu said.

“The organiser herself will never get a suitor – (nor would the) other women that would have been involved, as men will be by the road side to watch them.” Abdullahi is single since her divorce several years ago.

In an address to the press on the issue of the rally, the overall commandant of the Hisbah, Malam Ibrahim Mu’azzam stressed the need for widows  and divorcées to be empowered and it wasn’t right for them to demand for a law guiding divorce, since the Islamic religion has already provided that.

A widow named Hauwa Ado also felt that while widows and divorcées need to be empowered, the rally would have brought shame to women and exposes them to stigmatisation in the community.

A 42-year-old divorcée who spoke on condition of anonymity told IPS she feels the rally was a conspiracy between the executive director and some international organisations to bring the Muslim women into the streets against the Islamic norms and culture.

She notes that “the Islamic religion has already provided guidelines for divorce for all Muslims and as a believer one must accept the provisions as well as believing in destiny. I think the organisers are very weak in their belief towards Islam.”