What we work on
Rights are not separate problems. They are one life.
A woman's safety, the peace of her community, her health, her income and the environment she lives in are not separate issues — they are the same life, and a failure in one undoes progress in the others. C-RAWYC works across all five, anchored in the Maputo Protocol and Nigerian law.
01
Protection from harmful practices
Practices that violate the rights, health and dignity of women and girls — defended as culture, religion or tradition, and documented by the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the African Union as harmful.
Female genital mutilation (FGM)
The partial or total removal of external female genitalia for non-medical reasons. It carries lifelong physical and psychological harm and no health benefit. Nigeria has one of the highest absolute numbers of affected women in the world.
Child, early and forced marriage
Marrying girls before adulthood, often to much older men, ends their education, endangers their health through early pregnancy, and removes their power over their own lives.
Breast ironing (breast flattening)
Pressing or massaging a girl's developing breasts to delay their growth, in the belief it protects her from male attention. It is painful, damaging, and places responsibility for men's behaviour onto a child's body.
Widowhood and wife-inheritance rites
Practices that treat a widow as property to be passed to a male relative, or that subject her to degrading mourning rituals, confinement or dispossession of her home and inheritance.
Virginity testing
Physically inspecting girls and women to “prove” virginity. It has no scientific basis, violates dignity and privacy, and polices female bodies while ignoring the conduct of men entirely.
Son preference and the neglect of girls
Valuing boys over girls in food, healthcare, schooling and inheritance — a quieter harm that shapes a girl's whole life.
Ritual servitude and shrine slavery
Handing girls to shrines or priests to atone for a family's alleged offence, where they may be held as servants or subjected to sexual abuse. Known in parts of West Africa, including as trokosi.
Accusations of witchcraft against children and widows
Branding a child or an older woman a witch, often leading to abandonment, violence or death. It targets the powerless and is frequently driven by money or inheritance disputes.
Gender-based and sexual violence (GBV / SGBV)
Domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, intimate-partner homicide and the sexual exploitation of those with the least power.
Harassment, coercion and the abuse of authority
Sexual harassment at work and school, and the trading of grades, jobs or protection for sex. This is the ground the Respect Challenge covers most directly.
02
Peace, security and freedom of belief
When communities are unsafe, everything else stops — schools close, clinics empty, farms are abandoned. Women and children are rarely the ones who start conflict, and almost always the ones who carry its cost.
Human security and the protection of civilians
Armed attacks, banditry, abduction and violence against communities strip away every other right at once. We work on the protection, information and support that civilians — particularly women and children — need where the state's presence is thin.
Peacebuilding and intercommunal dialogue
Farmer–herder tensions, land disputes and intercommunal grievance rarely begin as violence. They begin as fear, rumour and unaddressed loss. We support dialogue that deals with the grievance before it becomes a reprisal.
Freedom of religion or belief
Every person has the right to worship, to change belief, or to hold none — without violence, coercion or the destruction of their community. We work for that protection for all faiths, taking no side but the civilian's.
Displacement and life in camps
Displacement multiplies every other risk. In camps and host communities, women and girls face exploitation, lost schooling, absent healthcare and no income — often for years, long after the news has moved on.
Women in peace and security processes
Under UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and Nigeria's National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, women have a right to a seat where peace is negotiated and security decided. In practice they are still largely absent from the rooms where their safety is settled.
Conflict-related sexual violence
Where there is conflict there is sexual violence, used deliberately and rarely answered for. Survivors need care, recognition and a route to justice, not silence and stigma.
03
Health and health rights
Health is a right, not a favour. Women, young people and children carry the heaviest share of Africa's disease burden and have the least power to demand care.
Maternal and newborn health
Nigeria accounts for a substantial share of the world's maternal deaths, and most are preventable. We work on the information, decision-making power and demand for care that keep women alive through pregnancy and childbirth.
HIV
Adolescent girls and young women remain disproportionately affected. Stigma, silence and unequal power in relationships block testing, disclosure and treatment adherence — all of which are as much rights problems as medical ones.
Tuberculosis
Nigeria carries one of the world's largest TB burdens, and a great many cases are never diagnosed. Poverty, crowded housing and the cost of seeking care keep people undetected and untreated.
Malaria
Pregnant women and children under five bear the greatest risk. Prevention depends on knowledge, access and household decisions that women are often not free to make.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)
Accurate information, access to services, and the right to decide freely and without coercion about one's own body, sexuality and family — including family planning, safe motherhood, and freedom from sexual violence. Adolescents are frequently denied both the facts and the choice.
Adolescent health and puberty education
Young people navigating puberty are met with silence, shame or misinformation. Clear, dignified information protects health and prevents the blame that falls on girls for their own development.
04
Economic empowerment
A woman without her own income has less power to leave, to refuse, to seek care, or to keep her daughter in school. Economic independence underwrites every other right.
Women's cooperatives and savings groups
Millions of Nigerian women already manage money together through esusu, adashe and ajo. We work to make these groups stronger, more transparent and less vulnerable to disputes and loss.
Financial literacy and digital tools
Practical skills and free tools that help women track money, plan, and keep clear records — so savings survive, and so a group's money is accountable to its members.
Livelihoods and enterprise
Support for the traders, farmers and artisans who hold households together, and for young women entering work with little bargaining power.
Land, inheritance and property rights
Widows dispossessed of homes and daughters passed over for inheritance are not private family matters — they are the legal and economic stripping of women, and they are contestable.
05
Environmental rights
Environmental harm is not gender-neutral. Where water is distant, fuel is scarce and land is degraded, it is women and children who walk, who carry, and who breathe the smoke.
Clean cooking and household air
Cooking on firewood and kerosene fills homes with smoke, and the lungs it damages most are women's and small children's. Cleaner cooking is a health right and an environmental one at once.
Water, sanitation and the burden of collection
When water is far away, girls fetch it — missing school, and exposed to harm on the journey. Sanitation without privacy or menstrual provision drives girls out of classrooms.
Climate impact on women farmers
Women produce much of Nigeria's food on land they rarely own. Failing rains, shrinking yields and lost harvests hit them first and hardest, with the least cushion to absorb it.
Pollution, waste and community health
Contaminated water, unmanaged waste and polluted air fall heaviest on poor communities, and on the women and children who spend the most time in them.
Land degradation, conflict and displacement
Where land fails, people move — and displacement multiplies every risk to women and children, from violence to lost schooling to lost healthcare.
How we work across all five
The methods do not change with the subject. What changes is what we are asking people to see differently.
Video-led public debate
Short films that put an issue and the belief behind it up for open discussion, in plain language, for a Nigerian audience.
Public education
Illustrated Unlearn pieces, the Respect Challenge, and tools that teach people to recognise harm and question inherited beliefs.
Research and evidence
Anonymous data on what people actually believe and where, so our advocacy rests on evidence rather than assumption.
Community engagement and advocacy
Working directly with communities, cooperatives, institutions and other organisations toward the standards set by the Maputo Protocol and Nigerian law.