Baobab over the years

BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights is a non-profit, non-governmental and non-religious women's human rights organization that is committed to the promotion and protection of rights of women and girls under the three parallel systems of law in Nigeria: namely customary, statutory, and religious laws. BAOBAB is a member of SOAWR since its inception and is currently a member of the Steering Committee. Similarly, the organization is on the Steering Committee of the Gender and Affirmative Action (GAA), a member of the Nigerian Women Alliance (NiWA), AWID, FEMNET, ESCR-Net, among others. BAOBAB operates from a national office in Abuja with programme, administrative and technical staff. In addition, there are also outreach teams across Nigeria.

Our outreach team consists of professionals from diverse backgrounds, who share BAOBAB's vision and give their time, resources and skills to implement BAOBAB's programmes and activities to concertize women's human rights in daily life. These state outreach teams' activities include leading legal consciousness workshops on different aspects of women's rights, training sessions, paralegal work, street theatres, transformative leadership and more. They serve to interface local level work, with women and men in rural and urban areas of Nigeria. They are link to examine, actualize and develop rights with people at all levels and in all regions of the country.

Timeline of our progression

3-years Research Project

1993 - 1996

Coordinated by the international solidarity network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), a multidisciplinary team of professionals conducted research on Women and Laws, with a focus on the means which secular and customary laws and practices interact with Muslim laws and practices. The project covered Muslim jurisprudence, the history of Muslim laws in Nigeria, Sharia court judgments, customary/traditional and daily practices in diverse communities across Nigeria.

Baobab's establishment

1996

The organization pioneered the struggle for women's legal rights under the three (3) parallel systems of law in Nigeria - customary, religious and statutory - as an intervention strategy to address the myriad of barriers to the actualization of the rights of women in all its forms, especially in Muslim majority communities.

Regional coordinator of WLUML

Until 2006, BAOBAB was the regional coordinator of the International Solidarity Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) in Africa and the Middle East

1996 - 2006

Nigerian Partner & regional coordinator for WLP

Between 2000 and 2013, Baobab served as the Nigerian Partner and Sub-Saharan Africa’s Regional Coordinator of Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development and Peace (WLP).

2000 - 2013

Co-coordinator of NFF

From the inception in 2007 until 2013, Baobab was the co-coordinator of the Nigerian Feminist Forum (NFF)

2007 -2013