A new report by the Ford Foundation and TechnoServe Explores has shown that although Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal are signatories to several international conventions against Gender-based violence, GBV, and have developed a legal framework that punishes offenders, there is still a low level of confidence in the protection offered by the law.
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The report which focused on Women’s Economic Empowerment and Gender-Based Violence in West Africa also looked at primary research conducted in Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal.
The report which also provided recommendations to civil society, government, the private sector, and the global aid community warned that it was important for development initiatives to consider how programs may impact levels of GBV.
Speaking during the launch of the report, the organisation’s Nigeria Country Director, Adesuwa Akinboro, said: “A fundamental ethos of international development is ‘not harm,’ and this certainly applies at TechnoServe.
“In this case, when women are empowered through the different capacity-building tools, we want to ensure that this does not expose them to the risk of violence and if it does, that there are mitigation plans that eliminate their exposure to GBV while empowering them economically.”
Akinboro added that findings from the report were very interesting because they found that when women are empowered in these communities, they have better earnings which enables them to support their families, including their spouses.
By carrying out focus groups and surveys with women entrepreneurs across the three countries, the researchers were able to find particular regional differences in perceptions related to women’s economic empowerment and GBV.
The West Africa program manager for the Ford Foundation, Olufunke Baruwa, said, “There are certain interesting insights in the report. In Ghana, for instance, the respondents defined an empowered woman as one who is single, independent and lives on her own.
” However, in Nigeria, this was not the case, as most of the respondents defined an empowered woman as one who is married and able to take care of her family and herself.
“This insight is in line with the conclusion of the report, which states that the nexus of women’s economic empowerment and gender-based violence is complex and contextual. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.”
Baruwa stated that the primary objective of the study was not just to look at social, religious and cultural norms that encourage GBV, but other recent factors that lead to violence. She added that this research would contribute tremendously to the body of knowledge in this area.
The relationship between women’s economic empowerment and the risk of gender-based violence varies significantly based on the geographical, socio-economic, and cultural context of a household. That is the principal finding of a recent study funded by the Ford Foundation and conducted in Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal by the Nigeria country platform of international nonprofit organisation TechnoServe.
GBV is a significant and persistent challenge in West Africa and other regions of the world.
For example, statistics from the Global Database on Violence against Women have shown that 22 per cent of women in Nigeria experience physical or sexual violence or both from a spouse or partner during their lifetimes.
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