Under the hot sun of northern Nigeria, Aisha approaches a group of women who are threshing sorghum in the field. Here, she educates them on good agricultural practices during the post-harvest stage.
Aisha is 27 years old and started coaching with 2SCALE in 2017. She coaches the Gidan Bakwai, a female farmer organization. In her daily work, Aisha teaches women how they can improve their farming activities; get better quality inputs; access to market, nutritious food and increased incomes.
What I like most in my work is the coaching actions. I like interacting with these women, because I get to know what their problems are. And I would help them find solutions to those problems
2SCALE aims to promote women empowerment as well as their involvement in activities at all levels. Female-led coaching is strongly encouraged within the partnerships. However being a female coach in a conservative society such as Northern Nigeria, where tradition and religion live side-by-side, is not easy.
For Aisha, training sessions and capacity-building workshops in other localities were becoming more frequent. Her husband, who originally encouraged her to apply for the coaching position, became weary of the extent of her travelling.
“It was in 2018, when we were called to go to Lagos for a training and meet with some people. We are haoussa and muslim. We believe so much in our religion, so we don’t really like women travelling to a far place without their husbands. That why he refused to allow me to go. I had to talk to his parents. But his parents were backing him up”.
Aisha was unsure what to do next, so she reached out to the 2SCALE country team leader in Nigeria, Maxwell Olitsa.
“Then I told Maxwell to intervene and he called him. They spoke on phone and met face to face. He understood after that. Now I continue going for my trainings and coaching sessions”.
Female farmers are happy with and respond well to Aisha’s coaching.
“Previously, they used to have a male coach. There were always some limitations during discussions. But with a female coach, there is a clearer level of understanding. They can express themselves better with a female coach. In our society, female-to-female is often better than female-to-male, especially when the male is not your husband”, she explains.
Aisha knows that women are suffering from some social, religious and traditional regulations in her community, and also across the world. That’s why she calls on men to allow women, or their wives, to be more involved, to become coaches themselves for farming organizations.
“This position of being a coach gave me more respect in this community. And I’ve got to know so many things about the activities that I didn’t know before. And I call on men to allow their wives to be coaches of these associations because it helps them to get more experience in life”.
