Ugbedomagwu community is locked in the woods. The dusty stretch of its bumpy road earned the land the tag- “hard to reach community.” This community is cut off from the world of civilization; it lacked everything but nature’s gift of soil and sunlight; to grow food and to keep the land warm. These gifts of nature only reminded the people that they were still in existence.
When ActionAid’s LRP made an inroad into the community, it was not the kind of visit they were used to; they only saw politicians once every 4 years during political campaigns. “Through the LRP, we were seriously enlightened and empowered to speak up” Hauwa Salami said. Indeed, the women of Ugbedomagwu had lost their voices to the entrenched culture of ‘women-silence’. “Women were not allowed to join in community meetings when the men gathered to make decisions. We only hear of the outcome of their decisions and have to obey”. She recalled how women made no contributions to decisions on domestic or communal matters.
The people’s burgeoning needs of lack of water borehole, poor telephone network, the need for health centres, electricity, need for primary school have been addressed through advocacy efforts led by the community members.
Looking in her late 40s, Hauwa noted how startled she and other members of the community were when ActionAid informed them that they also have the power to change the situation of their community through engaging the government. Hauwa said: “ActionAid built our primary school and trained us to engage with the government through advocacy and demand for other needs of the community. We did the advocacy and we got government to sink a borehole, another advocacy is ongoing for more teachers in our school” she noted.
One of the most outstanding accomplishments in the community is the closure of the gender inequality gap. Hauwa succinctly captured the situation: “Before ActionAid came here, our women cannot join meetings, women were not part of decision making, women were just supposed to have children, cook for their family, but were not empowered to voice their own opinion.”
Hauwa made bold to assert the confidence and equality the women of the community now share with the men. “Many things have changed since our engagement with the LRP, one of such things that changed after we learnt about para-legal is the reduction of the time women spend in mourning their late husbands, it used to be 9 months of ‘imprisonment’, apart from being locked up in a room, women were asked to bring 20 tubers of yam, a big goat and other things but through our advocacy and demands, the traditional leader considered the review of the custom, all those demands have been dropped and the 9-month mourning period has been reduced to 3 months without the requirement to offer goats and tubers of yam” she affirms.
Learning from the model of Ugbedomagwu, other adjoining communities – Offukpe, Ajodagnu, Idah, and Ejule have also been influenced to reduce the mourning period as well as scrapping the bogus requirements from women who are mourning their late husbands.