Real Life Stories: People Trafficking in Nigeria (WIDC)
The latest in our series of partner interviews is with Busayo Obisakin. She is the founder and CEO of Women Inspiration Development Center (WIDC), an NGO that works with women and girls to create a safe place for Nigerian women and girls in challenging life circumstances to envision and create new possibilities for their lives, families and communities. She is also a counselling psychologist at Obafemi Awolowo University (Ile Ife) and a World Pulse Community Ambassador.
To watch Busayo’s interview, please watch below:
This is the Liluye interview of Busayo:
I’m a Counselling Psychologist at a leading university in Nigeria called Obafemi Awolo University. I’m also the Founder and CEO of Women Inspiration Development Center, an NGO that is designed to create a safe place for disenfranchised women and girls; women that are facing one form of violence or the other creates a safe place for them to actually regain their confidence and then create a better life for themselves. That is what we have been doing for the past 11 years.
My name is Emma Lees. I am the volunteer Staff Writer for Liluye, and we’re excited to ask you a few questions. First of all, you’ve really developed a very cohesive project working with empowering women in Nigerian communities that are vulnerable and dealing with a lot of violence and challenging situations. How did you first get started in doing this work?
It has been a childhood dream since I grew up in a very big compound where violence against women is a normal thing. People don’t raise eyebrows on it. You could beat your wife and she could be hospitalized for a month. It’s still natural to do that. I grew up in that kind of environment and since I was nine I’ve been fighting this cause for women. It has been a childhood dream that when I grew up I would be talking and making cases for this cause. I carried this vision for a very long time because I didn’t know how to go about it.
I began to go through the internet… you know, the first thing you do is to go to Google. I went to Google and searched for women’s organisations all over the world, and lo and behold that’s how I found AWID, or the African Women in Development. I said this is African women. I want to know what they are doing. I’m an African woman. Maybe this will get me to the elite of what to do with my vision. I quickly joined them and that’s when I first found out about World Pulse (a global forum) and a competition, too, where women write about what is going on to women in their community. I grabbed this opportunity, and when the final came, out of the 523 women who entered, I got selected for the award to visit the U.S. I was the only one to go to the U.S. to attend the Empowerment Institute where I learned about empowerment of women. This is also where my vision started becoming a reality. I started immediately when I got back to Nigeria. That is how the Women Inspiration Development Center started. We have empowered many women in Nigeria; about 6,000.
What would you say are your specific missions and goals?
The Women Inspirational Development Center was set up to create a safe place for Nigerian women and girls that are facing one form of violence or the other to regain their confidence. You know when you are facing violence, it might be domestic, sexual, or trafficking. Either way, you’ve lost your confidence because you feel dejected, depressed, and ask the question, “Why me?” There is a need for them to regain their confidence, and when they regain it, they must have something tangible to learn, and do, to give them more confidence. This will help them to live a fulfilled life on their own, and those are the things that we have been doing all these years.
In addition, we organise agency-based workshops for them. These workshops work on several areas where women could develop a vision, such as relationships, emotions, their sexuality, their body, money, spirituality, and their work. They learn to live a thriving life and a life of fulfillment. We also bring these women together, to support one another. Then, as they support one another, we train them on one vocation or the other. Those that want to go back to school, we will help them; assist them in going back to school.
I know more recently you’ve been working on a very specific project to develop some training workshops around the new tie-dye project with Liluye. Could you explain a bit about that for us?
The new initiative that the Women Inspiration Development Center is working on right now is the Confident Girls Initiative? As a result of Covid-19, there was a surge in violence against women around the world and in Nigeria. In fact, violence against women became the size of pandemic itself. It’s like we were having two pandemics to attend to, as we were facing Covid-19 and also the pandemic of domestic and sexual violence. Girls aren’t safe anywhere anymore… not in the streets, at work, or even at home, and that should be their safe haven! That was how I came up with the Confident Girls Initiative. The goal is to raise girl ambassadors around Nigeria that could be working together. We plan to develop a corresponding mobile app called Sisterhood Connects that would have several NGOs in the system. The ambassadors will be able to, with the help of GPS, locate an organization that could help them immediately. But, the first thing we want to do for our ambassadors is to organise an agency-based workshop for them to gain confidence to enable them to become global activists in their community where they will be working.
With Liluye, we have gathered ten trafficked girls/women that want to regain their life back. We will train them to make bags and shoes, and Liluye will sell those things on our behalf. We will also be able to help these women to reestablish themselves holistically so that they can gain their life back, as they have lost for many years.
What would you say has been your most memorable achievement?
Well, the most memorable experience that I will never forget is when we started having our agency-based workshop. We went to villages and found out 80% of women had been facing one form of violence or the other in their homes. We had our workshop where we worked with about 450 women, in 2018. A year later, when we went back to this village, about 85% of them already had one form of work. Some of them had private farms, started small businesses, or other things. The most memorable thing is that five of them, who were appointed into the village council, didn’t previously have any women at all. They were appointed into the council which has helped domestic violence, also to gain more justice, too, which gives me a lot of joy each time I remember this incident.
Could you tell us a bit about your experience with Victor Lyons’ PTSD training?
I’m already a Counselling Psychologist so I find it very interesting and it’s a step forward for my work. I was able to gain new skills for our work with these women and myself personally, particularly learning about first intervention for people who suffer from PTSD. The training at the very least reduces strong, harmful emotions like anxiety and depression until they get an additional intervention at a later point. This is very important and has a lot of potential to help the people we work with and beyond.
In fact, I have the mind to spread this PTSD training to another NGO I’m working with so we can start scaling up this training, and then work with even more NGO’s. It’s something that will help us in our work, apart from the one-on-one counselling that we already give to women that are facing violence. It could also further help them in healing their trauma to a certain level and we can then see how this work develops further.
For more information on the PTSD training, please see the Liluye Training page here, or contact Victor Lyons at SessionWise.
Is there anything else that you would like to talk about?
Yes. In case this interview gets to some people that are decision makers for grassroots NGOs. You should be focused on grassroot NGOs, and resources should be targeted as they are the ones closest to the people. They are the ones who know how the people are feeling, and also the ones that can help everyone around the the world to minimise violence against women, trafficking, sexual violence, domestic violence, or any form of violence. It’s the grassroots NGOs that are the ones that could actually make a difference.
Where to send funding for your work?
To fund the work of the Women Inspiration Development Center, then please donate here.
Visit Women Inspiration Development Center on the web: Women Inspiration Development Center (widcng.org)
Visit Women Inspiration Development Center on Facebook: Women Inspiration Development Center
Best of luck with everything with the Women Inspiration Development Center.
Thank you so much.
For more information about Liluye or to inquire about becoming a partner, please visit www.liluye.org/contact. Or, if you are interested in donating to Liluye, please visit: www.liluye.org/donate.
Busayo was interviewed by Liluye Staff Writer, Emma Lees, who also writes on her blog, InnerExpat.