ChiChi Aniagolu-Okoye

There has been no effective system to support rural women victims of domestic violence at community levels in Nigeria. ChiChi Aniagolu-Okoye has created an easily replicable grassroots solution to empower rural women to support each other and mediate conflicts while maintaining community cohesion.

ChiChi is leveraging existing community structures to create a support network of Sister Guardians for victims of domestic abuse in rural Nigeria. She uses Umuada (Daughters of the Community) to embed the Sister Guardians within community life so that they can provide shelter, mediation, and support to women in need.
The women in a community choose Sister Guardians according to a specific set of criteria. The women are confident, financially stable, and are leaders in their communities. They provide support, protection, advocacy, and mediation skills to women experiencing domestic violence. They also carry out a preventive function by advocating for nonviolence in the community. Through Sister Guardians, ChiChi is challenging the self-perpetuated silence around domestic violence and is enabling women to find a collective voice to speak out against abuse.
Of course, there are situations in which mediation does not work. In these cases, the Sister Guardians go to the police and work with the victim to address the issue. ChiChi has developed relationships with local police authorities and provided training and technical support to shift their beliefs and empower them to take action. She emphasizes to the police that at the point when a Sister Guardian approaches them, all other private mediation strategies have already been deployed. ChiChi works with the police and the Sister Guardians to develop trusting relationships, so that when the need arises, the Sister Guardians can approach them without the fear of being turned away.

One in four Nigerian women experience domestic violence in rural areas. There is a pervasive cultural belief that a wife is a man’s property and that he may choose how to treat her. Both the community and the police view issues of domestic violence from this mindset and more often than not, women are blamed for instigating the abuse. If a woman returns to her parents’ home for shelter, she is sent back and told that she now belongs to her husband. Similarly, the police maintain that domestic violence is a private issue that should not be dealt with in public and often choose to do nothing after a complaint. As a result, there is no support system for women to turn to, nor are there effective community or municipal authority structures in place to deal with issues of domestic violence.
Section 55 of the Nigerian Penal Code legitimizes this cultural belief, which allows a man to engage in wife battery so long as it does not result in excessive or grievous bodily injury. The definition of ‘grievous bodily harm’ refers to maiming, the chopping off of limbs, and so on. Thus, until this point, a man may legally harm his wife. Although this law is only applicable in Muslim majority Northern Nigeria, law enforcement officials take advantage of rural women by giving them the false impression that this law is also applicable in southern states. Unlike urban areas where citizen organizations (COs) bring the fight against domestic violence to the forefront, this issue is hidden behind house walls and shrouded in a cloak of secrecy by the women themselves.
Through Sister Guardians, ChiChi is challenging the self-perpetuated silence around domestic violence and is enabling women to find a collective voice to speak out against abuse.
This cultural belief—and its continued affirmation by the community, the police, and the law—has socialized women to avoid talking about their experiences of domestic violence, even among themselves. Though there are community structures in place for women to address issues that pertain to them and resolve disputes, domestic violence is considered a personal matter, not dealt with like other social challenges. ChiChi is challenging this belief and empowering women to discuss and confront this issue.

ChiChi quickly understood that most domestic violence disputes are a function of a normalized culture of abuse against women (considered “disciplining” as it would be with a misbehaving child), rather than severe acts of violence. As such, most women in rural areas prefer to stay in their marriages and work toward internal agreements and compromises even when faced with such abuse. While other COs are focused on empowering women to take drastic action—such as leaving their homes with their children—ChiChi positions the Sister Guardians to seek cohesive community solutions. In this way, while victims of abuse may avoid approaching other COs, they feel comfortable working with the Sister Guardians to mediate domestic disputes. The Sister Guardians seek reconciliation, while also finding community mechanisms to shame the men into behavior change.
The Umuada are groups that Nigerian women belong to simply by virtue of their birth into a specific community. These groups have social structures and guiding rules and regulations; even when members move away from their birthplace, they join chapters of their Umuada in their new locations. Umuada groups are specific to Southeastern Nigeria but similar social structures (with different names) exist all over the country.
ChiChi enters a community through the Umuada network and establishes a formal relationship with the group if there is community interest and support for the idea. The success rests on the Sister Guardians, and as such, ChiChi has developed strict selection criteria. She approaches the Umuada to nominate several women and then determines whether they meet the criteria. Sister Guardians must be confident enough to take risks and mediate between husbands and wives during times of conflict. These women must be respected and morally upstanding—they will not spread a victim’s personal stories to others in the village. Sister Guardians sign confidentiality agreements to ensure that information obtained during the mediation period is not divulged to others. Sister Guardians must also be women of some financial means in order to shelter the victim during the resolution period. Lastly, they must have husbands who fully support the Sister Guardian Program’s vision and objectives.
ChiChi is working toward government-supported safe houses in each of the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria so that there are nearby options for women across the country.
When a woman who has experienced abuse arrives, the Sister Guardian shelters her and helps devise a plan of action according to the wife’s wishes. The Sister Guardians are given a small stipend by ChiChi’s organization (South Saharan Social Development Organization) to cover additional expenses. So far, ChiChi has worked with about six communities and has over fifty Sister Guardians in the network. Women are trained to provide non-prescriptive support, mediation, counseling, and preventative advocacy work. Women usually work within their own community leadership structures to develop ways to collectively shame the accused men into behavior change. ChiChi works with the Sister Guardians to develop memorandums of understanding with local governments and the police.
After experiencing resistance from the police, ChiChi began training officers in the Nigerian police force to work with Sister Guardians and to provide approachable and effective services when they receive reports about domestic violence. Thus far, she has trained police officers in Enugu State and is developing a training curriculum so that this can be spread and implemented by other organizations working with the police force. By using her own network, ChiChi is working with the government to build safe houses in Enugu State, southeastern Nigeria. The only existing safe houses in Nigeria are in Lagos and Abuja, locations that are inaccessible for rural women. ChiChi is working toward government-supported safe houses in each of the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria so that there are nearby options for women across the country.
Given the existing Umuada type groups and the prevalence of women’s organizations across Nigeria, ChiChi is hoping to spread her low-cost idea through these existing institutions. She is developing a training manual to recruit and train Sister Guardians. This model involves only the cost of time for training, implementation by the organization, and small stipends for the Sister Guardians who provide shelter. ChiChi is organizing a national conference for organizations and leaders dedicated to women’s empowerment in the fight against domestic violence. She will share her model and tools at this conference to gauge support and devise a plan of action for expansion into new states. ChiChi has already established a relationship with a staff member at the Economic Community of West African States to share this idea with other West African countries with similar community structures and issues of domestic violence.

ChiChi learned a powerful lesson from her father’s life story. He was orphaned at age two, but with community support, he attended school, excelled in his education, and later become a Supreme Court Judge in Nigeria. From this, ChiChi understood the power of a community to achieve a shared goal. This lesson would coalesce over the years and resurface as the Sister Guardians.
Throughout ChiChi’s life, she has slowly worked toward her goal of supporting women’s empowerment in Nigeria. As a lecturer, in Ireland, she took on leadership roles in Women’s Studies and encouraged young women to be successful in the sciences. When ChiChi returned to Nigeria, she worked to end gang violence toward women in universities. She launched the “I’m Too Cool For Rape” campaign, to promote the idea that enlightened young men never use violence.
Between 2001 and 2006, she served as the Country Director for the Ashoka Anglophone West Africa office, based in Nigeria. In this position, she established the South Saharan Social Development Organization. At the time, this organization provided microcredit for rural women so as to provide them with a sense of financial independence and freedom. An unanticipated negative consequence of this scheme was that the women’s new bargaining power in the household made them vulnerable to violence from their husbands. This became a challenge she struggled to surmount.

ChiChi found insight into this issue when her own sister-in-law became a victim of domestic violence. While counseling her, ChiChi was surprised to discover that she did not want to abandon her marriage altogether. Instead, she wished for some time apart and for assistance with the mediation process. This was an eye-opening moment for ChiChi because she finally understood that many rural women felt similarly but had no support system to turn to for services. This realization birthed the Sister Guardian model.