Superwoman Network Empowers Vulnerable Women in Sudan

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Hannah McNeish

Based in Khartoum, the Superwoman Network brings together five civil society organizations to provide support, legal aid and training to help women who were once the victims of domestic violence and FGM.

KHARTOUM, Sudan – Before Jamila joined the Superwoman Network in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, she felt powerless and alone in her struggle to cope with years of violence from the two closest men in her life.

“Anything he saw in front of him, he would use to beat me,” she says of the husband she left eight years ago.

But after escaping her husband, Jamila and her children suffered at the hands of her father who, unemployed due to sickness and supporting two new wives and more children, resented having to support them, too.

“When I argued with his children whilst ironing, he took the iron and burnt me with it,” says Jamila, pointing out the nicks and dark patches of scar tissue on her neck, arms and chest. “He has also burnt my sons. The eldest has marks all over his body from where [my father] would heat up a screwdriver and burn him with it.”

To help women like Jamila – women with nowhere left to turn – the Superwoman Network brings together five civil society organizations. The group offers support to vulnerable women in contact with the law, such as current and released prisoners, as well as single mothers and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

“We give them hope that life is still there,” says Amani Tabidi, executive director of one of the network’s members, the Babiker Badri Scientific Association for Women’s Studies (BBSAWS) at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman. BBSAWS provides the women with skills training and basic literacy. It also offers “legal and psychological support to overcome stigma and economic empowerment,” says Tabidi, who is also a lecturer at Ahfad University and recruits peers to mentor the women.

“Most of the women are coming from very poor communities, so they don’t have someone to help them,” she says.

They also often see no way out. Last year, Rashida Manjoo, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women at the time, visited Sudan and voiced her concern about the culture of “silence and denial” when it came to the subject of SGBV. When Jamila told people about her father’s abuse, “they would tell me, ‘At the end of the day, this is your dad and may God help him,’” she says.

Jamila and other SGBV victims who are trapped by violence have been able to use the Superwoman Network’s sessions on coping mechanisms to help deal with, and lessen, the abuse they suffer until they can get away from it. “The sessions changed the way I think,” says Jamila. “The situation at home is the same but I’m emotionally stronger.”

Now, when Jamila’s father loses his temper, she says she uses breathing and meditation techniques to stop herself from shouting back and escalating the situation, and to calm herself afterwards.

The Superwoman Network has also given Jamila cooking utensils and trained her on cookery and crafts to get her closer to her goal of freeing herself from her father’s support by setting up a baking business.

Since launching last year with funding from the United Nations Development Programme and the Finnish embassy in Egypt, the Superwoman Network has helped over 30 women. The network hopes to have helped 100 women by May 2017. It’s an ambitious target in a country where public support and advocacy of women’s rights is routinely stifled.

Fatima joined the network through an organization that helped her rebuild her life after female genital mutilation (FGM) nearly ruined it. The procedure made sex impossible, sometimes causing her to bleed, which traumatized both her and her husband. Through one of the other Superwoman partners, SEEMA Centre for Training and Protection of Women and Child’s Rights, which helps women affected by GBV, Fatima was able to have surgery to repair the physical damage caused by the FGM as well as counselling for her and her husband to overcome the emotional trauma.

She now runs a small catering business and advocates against FGM in her own family and at SEEMA events. “This network opened my life,” she says. “Before, I was confined to my home and now I’m exposed to lots of different things and people.”

The women also support one another through saving and lending groups to finance projects that will boost their status in their communities or at home.

The effect trickles down to other women in their communities and to the next generation, too. Fatima’s community has stopped carrying out FGM after she found the courage to tell them what she went through.

Tabidi cites other cultural changes: “Some of [the women] benefit from this project by pushing their daughters to education.”

For Jamila, one of the most important things she has learned from the Superwoman Network is that she is not alone. “It taught me how to change my thoughts,” she says, “and now the life I’m living is completely different.”

The names of some of the women have been changed to protect their identities.

Shelter Helps Stigmatized Young Mothers Build Happy Families in Sudan

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Hannah McNeish

In Sudan, girls and young women who have children are often abandoned by their families and stigmatized in their communities. A shelter in Khartoum gives these mothers a home and works to help them build their families.

KHARTOUM, Sudan – Nour Hussein has been dreaming of happy families since she was a little girl, when she and her sister were put in Sudan’s largest institution for “lost” children. After her mother, who suffered from a mental-health illness, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, Hussein and her sister were sent to Mygoma, a state-run home in the capital, Khartoum. At around five years old, Hussein and some of the other children were transferred to private care homes. She moved again when she was 12 and eventually tracked down her mother six years later.

Although she got the chance to nurse her mother until her death, Hussein vividly remembers what it was like to grow up missing her. “Nothing in the world will give you anything like what a mother gives you, nowhere in the world,” she says.

Women and girls in Sudan who have children out of wedlock – even in cases of rape and incest – are often cast out by their families. “There’s no way to live in the community with your child without a father, especially if the girl is not married. The family doesn’t accept the child. They say, ‘Go away from this home until there is a father,’” says Hussein. “They will put the girl in the street, and police collect her and put her in an institution.”

There are many of these institutions, mostly government-run, dotted around Sudan, full of children whose mothers chose to have them instead of risking backstreet abortions. But mothers aren’t allowed to stay with their babies. To keep their children means to be ostracized from their communities; rejoining their families means having to leave their children behind.

So in 2010, Hussein and several friends from her childhood days in care homes set up the Shamaa shelter, a place where instead of abandoning their children, mothers could stay with them and work towards building a family. Since opening, the shelter has helped 815 women and girls, giving them a place to live in a quiet Khartoum neighborhood, and providing medical and psychosocial services during pregnancy, birth and the first stages of motherhood.

The women and girls can stay as long as they like – from a few months up to a year – while Hussein and her team look after them and their babies as they go through mediation with parents and partners.

In most cases, and only when the young mothers agree, Shamaa helps to arrange a marriage with the child’s biological father. If he is deemed unsuitable or is rejected by the girl or her family, Shamaa helps to find the girl a new partner from a pool of what the organization calls “volunteer fathers.” These men, whom Shamaa finds and heavily vets, agree to marry single mothers out of a sense of duty to care for a vulnerable child, which the Quran highlights as a great act of kindness.

“All these girls, we help them, and now they are inside our community and living with their families, with the real father or sometimes a volunteer father,” says Hussein. “We make families.”

Zara, a 30-year-old teacher with a 13-month-old baby, thought her life was over when she discovered she was pregnant and the father refused to marry her. “I was so afraid,” she says, adding that she was scared of her brothers. When asked how she thought they’d react, she switches from Arabic to English. “Maybe kill me,” she says.

Now Zara is about to start a new life outside the shelter with an engineer who started off as a volunteer father. “I love him,” she says with a grin, as she presses one hand to her chest and cradles her baby with the other, her engagement ring glinting under the strip light in a room bare but for three single beds, all occupied.

“Shamaa has given me everything. First, it was a safe place to be with my baby, and now they have found someone for me to marry so I can live with him and my baby.”

Shamaa is also working with Sudan’s Ministry of Welfare and Ministry of Interior to get more than 2,000 children and young people who were abandoned or born out of wedlock birth certificates, social security numbers and passports. Giving a child legal status in Sudan requires that the mother be married to the father or at least get him to sign a form officially recognizing the child as his.

Struggling to pay for its shelter due to funding cuts from larger charities, Shamaa will soon have to downsize. But its work will continue, says Hussein, whose first name, Nour, means “light” in Arabic.

“We need to make a light in our community,” she says, to make people realize “that these children are not guilty” and need to be nurtured by families to avoid them ending up in large institutions, where development disorders are common.

“We are all Sudanese. These children, they must accept them, they must love them.”

The names of some of the women in this story have been changed to protect their identities.

South Sudanese Women Carry Bulk of the Burden in Uganda Refugee Camps

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Lorena Ríos

With their husbands fighting in the civil war or struggling to find work, the South Sudanese women staying in Uganda’s refugee camps often find themselves responsible for supporting their families on their own.

ADJUMANI, Uganda – When violence between government and opposition forces broke out in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, in July, Regina fled to Uganda with her husband and their seven children. After a month in the newly established Pagarinya refugee settlement in northern Uganda, her husband left. “My husband went back because there is no work in the camp,” says Regina, 37, sitting surrounded by her children on a Sunday morning in late September. Since his departure, she has not been able to communicate with him and has not received remittances. “I put my faith in God,” she said resolutely.

The recent clashes in Juba sparked an exodus of South Sudanese fleeing into neighboring countries such as Uganda, where three-quarters of the refugees have headed since July – more than 85 percent of them women and children. Poverty, lack of employment and education, and dependency on unreliable food aid only exacerbate the desperate conditions in many settlements. And often, women find themselves coping with these challenges on their own. With their husbands either staying behind in South Sudan to fight or struggling to find work in the refugee camps, many women have to take on the roles of breadwinner and head of the household on top of their traditional responsibilities.

“The majority of people in the settlement picking wood are women,” says Regina. “I go find firewood and sometimes my daughter comes as well.” For Regina, like many other women staying in Pagarinya, collecting wood is a four-hour task, as cutting trees is prohibited inside the settlement. A Ugandan shop overflowing with firewood and timber sits across from her plot, but Regina can’t afford to buy any. If she wants to cook for her family, she has to wake up at 5 a.m. to find firewood.

According to research by Molly Kellogg of the U.N. Women’s Peace and Security team in Uganda, the country’s limited resources for meeting the most basic protection services inside the settlements “compound the burden of violence South Sudanese women refugees bear.” Furthermore, U.N. Women found that in Kiryandongo refugee settlement, 68 percent of women refugees suffer from psychological trauma. “The breakdown of structures, forced displacement of people and separation of families have increased the prevalence of gender-based violence in the refugee settlements,” writes Kellogg in the report, which is not yet published.

Uganda’s progressive policy towards refugees grants them one 98 foot by 98 foot (30m by 30m) plot of land per household. However, this is not enough for women to feed their families and pay for school fees. To make enough to support their families, women often have to work in the fields around the settlements – making as little as 2,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.60) for a full day’s work – and sell a portion of their food rations.

In Ayilo refugee settlement, a few kilometers away from Pagariyna, a group of about 50 women gathers to talk about the trauma brought on by years of war and displacement. Even though most of them have been refugees since civil war broke out in South Sudan in 2013, none of them have yet reached self-reliance. “Our husbands don’t work, they stay at home,” says one of the women in the group. “Men are embarrassed to work in the fields since it is ‘women’s work.’”

The title of “refugee” is only for women, one of them says, to which the group quietly cheers, lamenting the precariousness of life in displacement and the challenges of carrying out their traditional roles as well as the added responsibility of ensuring the survival of their families.

With her husband fighting in South Sudan, Christine, 29, from Western Equatoria, relies on her children to help make ends meet. She has been living in Boroli refugee settlement in Adjumani district with her four children and five foster children since 2014. “My husband doesn’t get a salary,” she says. “He hasn’t earned anything in five months and we don’t have land to cultivate in the settlement.”

To pay for her children’s school fees, Christine sells food rations and works in the fields for about $3 a day. Her children help her pick groundnuts. And still, she can only afford school for one of her children at a time. At the moment, she’s sending her five-year-old son because he is the strongest, she says: “He doesn’t cry as much.”

Back in Pagariyna, Regina sits under the only tree in her plot and watches as people return to their plots after Sunday service. “I want to go to church, but I can’t,” she says. “I have to cook for the children.” Nearby, one of her children, a toddler, is chopping wood, letting the axe fall on a tree branch twice his size.

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of its Africa Great Lakes Initiative.