Women Centre

What is women’s empowerment?
Empowerment is a process by which those who have been denied a certain right get that right. This goes to the extent of having the ability to make free choice of what they want.

For a woman to be empowered, means she should have the freedom to choose example, a marriage partner, a way of livelihood, or what she really wants for herself as long as it does no harm to anyone.

Key issues which need to be tackles include before a woman can e empowered, hence the contribution of the husband and her parents:
• The need to recognize that her empowerment does not violate the essence of her religion and culture.
• The need to recognize that her empowerment can result to the well being of the entire family.
• The need to recognize that her empowerment will make her a better wife, adviser, mother or grandmother.
• The need to recognize that her empowerment will improve the moral being of not only her family with but the entire community. ‘’Educate a woman, you educate the society’’

In nearly every house hold in Sokoto state, our wives practice ‘’stay at home’’ referred in Hausa language as ‘’KULLE’’ or ‘’Purdah’’ in Arabic and although it’s a religious obligation to many it makes them to loose the opportunity to work to earn for themselves. Consequently this makes some of them totally dependant on their husband for the feeding, clothing, medical & all other expenses making them more likely to live in poverty than the husbands. They will spend much of the day performing tasks to maintain the household, such as cooking. caring for the children, washing-up, house keeping etc but earn nothing.

Of course it is a religious choice for a wife to either stay at home as explained above or when going out to be modestly dressed to prevent exposing her body and I strongly support that but those families who choose ‘’kulle’’ option must find a way to empower their wives for them to be productive and be economically free from the husbands.

They should not neglect & enslave the wives making them to simply be un-paid workers completely dependant on the hand outs the husbands choose to bring. Islam has strongly advocated ‘’taking good care of our dependants’’ and the top from the list is our wives.

There is no excuse for not empowering a woman both religiously & in the modern world context.