Current Activities

Make Women Safe Campaign

Make Women Safe Campaign seeks to promote women’s safety in society by creating awareness about violence against women and lobbying for legislation and regulations to criminalize it in Lagos State, Nigeria’s commercial centre and second largest state.

The Campaign's main project is a play to raise awareness about violence against women (Vday 2007).

 

VDAY. LAGOS 2007. VAGINA MONOLOGUES.
The V-Day Theme for 2007 was Reclaiming Peace

Building on a successful first outing in 2006, KIND decided to stage the Vagina Monologues in Nigeria again in March 2007. Using a formula that had worked before, we engaged Ms. Joke Silva, renowned actress and producer, to produce the play, which was staged in Nigeria’s commercial centre, Lagos. Enough people were eager to see the play that 2 of the 3 performances sold out.  At the end of the three performances staged in MUSON and Planet One, which started on the 14th of March and ended on the 21st, 2000 people had watched a festive rendition of the Vagina Monologues. (Read More...)

 

30 by 11 Campaign

30 by 11 seeks to increase the participation of Nigerian women in politics to 30% by the year 2011.

The last decade has witnessed increased women political representation in different tiers of democratic governments in many African countries. Unfortunately, Nigeria falls in the category of countries with the lowest proportion of women political representation. In the first election following two decades of military rule held in 1999, women secured 3% representation of contested positions, in the 2003 elections, women secured 4% and in the 2007 elections, women secured 6%.

Women representation is low for several reasons, including:

• Lack of an affirmative action quota for women.
• Lack of free and fair elections.
• Lack of knowledge of the written and unwritten rules of the political process among women aspirants.
• Lack of coordination by NGOs
• Lack of continuity of NGO activities with individual organizations starting projects right before an election and ending right after; the lack of continuity weakens NGO ability to effectively support women politicians. 

In response to these challenges, 30 by 11 is:

• Building a coalition of NGOs and grassroots women’s associations that coordinate their support of and advocacy for women aspirants.
• Identifying and engaging relevant stakeholders such as Independent National Electoral Commission and political parties on introducing a quota
• Identifying aspirants & providing capacity building training.
• Identifying young women with political aspirations and pairing them with established women politicians in a mentoring relationship.
• Raising public awareness and support by providing information on the states; and parties’ performance on women representation and by running PR campaigns for women aspirants.
• Establishing a legal fund to enable women politicians challenge electoral malpractice.
• Making recommendations for reform to the electoral commission to ensure free and fair elections.

 

KIND Centre

An additional activity is establishing a permanent KIND Centre:

• as a physical space for developing and providing services, resources and other forms of support to women
• as an income generator with halls, seminar rooms and grounds that can be rented out to people in the community for events