From IDPs to female mechanics: N/East women find dignity in work

Fatima Mohammed was done with secondary school and waiting to gain admission into a higher institution. Then Boko Haram visited violence on her Gaidam community in Adamawa and her future went bleak – no school, no home. This week, the 20-year-old graduated as a mechanical mechatronics with City & Guild certification for her technical skills. […]

Fatima Mohammed was done with secondary school and waiting to gain admission into a higher institution. Then Boko Haram visited violence on her Gaidam community in Adamawa and her future went bleak – no school, no home.

This week, the 20-year-old graduated as a mechanical mechatronics with City & Guild certification for her technical skills.

 “In the North-east, I know only one girl who does this kind of work but she works on Mercedes Benz cars only…Somewhere in Borno, I think. I have never seen her. I only heard about her,” she says.

Female mechanics are rare, and Mohammed is already seeing the comparison in a male-dominated industry. But what she finds more stunning are the things she can do now.

“I didn’t know anything about cars before. I did not even know what a spanner was. I never held a spanner in my life. Now I do engine service, oil draining, suspension seating, brake systems work.”

Mohammed is one of only two women in a class of 79 trained at PAN Learning Centre in Kaduna – the first batch to graduate in a technical skill acquisition programme sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme which started last year.

A total of 700 people displaced from Yobe, Adamawa and Borno states by the Boko Haram violence are training under the UNDP’s “early recovery” and desperately need to get back on their feet.

Some 575 of them are registered. Only 16 of them are women-training in Kaduna, Yobe Technical College and Ramat Polytechnic in Maiduguri.

Janet Ibrahim, 30, lived in the neighbourhood of Banki, Maiduguri. Banki is fondly called “New Banki City”, throwing up vision of modern homes. But it is an overcrowded camp for tens of thousands of desperate people made homeless by Boko Haram.

Ibrahim made a living running a hairdressing salon. Then the terrorists came and everything changed.

“Boko Haram scattered our area. I had nothing to start on again, so I joined the programme,” she says. She graduated as an auto-spray painter and panel beater.

The programme ranges from automechanics, mechatronics, panel beating, and defensive driving, infusing the gadgetry needed to compete in today’s increasingly electronic automotive industry.

“The bright news is that (the programme) hasn’t just trained them but provided them with equipment to start using their skills,” says Elizabeth Mordi, director-general of the centre, which has retained the best graduating student on automatic employment.

To prove their skills, the trainees donated their first job – sets of school desks and chairs – to pupils of Angwan Makama Primary School.

Mohammed joined in building the school gifts. Angwan Makama has been her neighbourhood for the past 12 months. She lived on a N26,000 monthly allowance from the programme. 

Her course was five days a week of classroom work, and another five days a week of hands on gizmos and dirt in the workshop. That’s followed by six months of internship.

“One week in class, two weeks in workshop. Everything taught in class is demonstrated physically,” says Michael Adegbe, coordinator of the programme and a technical and mechatronics instructor.

“We also do industrial attachment, so they see live situations, where customers come with problems, and how they are solved,” he said.

After a year’s training, Mohammed is headed back home to Adamawa, which is still recovering, and hoping to set up shop there. The male graduates are looking to join up as startups and grow from there. Their hope is to enable recovery in the North-east.

The area has been badly hit, and women and young people bear the brunt. The UNDP estimates more than 250,000 households are in urgent need of early recovery support, including shelter, food, livelihood, social infrastructure and public security.

“It is important to note that currently, over 80 percent of households affected by the insurgency spend more than they earn, and 30 percent of households are economically inactive,” said Samuel Bwalya, country director of UNDP in Nigeria.

“It is our hope that after passing through this training process, the graduates, depending on the programme they were engaged in, are peace advocates, responsible citizens, better business managers and potential leaders in their communities.”

Ibrahim thinks that’s possible, considering becoming a panel beater was never on her agenda back in Banki.

“I will start my workshop in Maiduguri, and maybe we will see some people. I am ready to train others. I have to teach them. I know they will be interested,” Ibrahim says.

“For now I can only tell them to learn as I learned, and I know they will do very well.” Her advice is for young women, many of whom the Presidential Committee on the North East Initiative says have been orphaned by Boko Haram and need much support.

“Nobody chose for me,” Ibrahim says of her new-found career as a spray painter and panel beater. 

“I am the one who chose it by myself. I never did it before, but I felt I could do it,” she said.