Nana is a registered NGO working in Northern Nigeria to provide innovative, scalable and cost-effective interventions that empower women and girls and provide them with opportunities to challenge the existing gender inequality. Nana as an organization is passionate about girls and women and cherishes integrity, equity and justice. This passion is reflected in the work we do and how we do them. To provide opportunity to girls and women and to challenge gender inequality, Nana adopts two approaches: first, our work addresses the practical gender needs of girls and women by providing them with opportunities to access and excel in school, pursue their chosen career, including politics? as well as other forms of economic empowerment, including facilitating access to finances. The second approach is working to address the strategic gender needs of women and girls on the way we deliver the practical needs. We do not only improve women’s and girl’s access to education and career for example, but more importantly, we them to challenge the norms and values that support and perpetuate such discriminations through building the agency of the girls and engaging with religious, traditional and political leaders. We recognize the fact that every parent wants their daughters to prosper and ‘become somebody’ useful to the family and the ‘al’umma’ (community).

The biggest obstacles are lack of financial (cost of schooling/training and poverty), social (ability to withstand social pressure) and political capital (voice and accountability). Similarly, we recognize and appreciate the fact that majority of ordinary women and girls are engaged on one form of economic activities or the other in order to contribute to family income. The value of women’s economic engagement is entrenched in Northern Nigeria, that almost every native woman and girls are economically engaged. The 2013 National Demographic Health Survey reported high level of women economic independence in North West zones compared to the zones in the South. The Survey reported that 88% of women from the North west have sole control over their earnings than 41% in the South east. So, Nana approach is not just providing opportunities, but also building the agencies of women and girls to negotiate against all forms of discriminations. The local reality that virtually all rural Hausa families practice a system of seclusion, in which married women are expected to conduct most activities within their compound and other private spaces influences Nana’s approach to empowerment. Majority of rural Hausa women need the permission of their husbands to go outside the home to visit a relative or a health facility even in the case of an obstetric emergency. With the limitations of seclusion, Northern women do engage in a variety of economic activities in their homes such as agricultural processing, embroidering, sewing, and preparing products for sale. Northern women’s dependent on the labour of girls is unavoidable because of seclusion. Women are dependents on girls to buy raw materials needed for their economic activities, to hawk for them and to do other domestic chores such as bringing water, and minding younger siblings—so keeping a daughter in school presents mothers with significant opportunity costs