Gender Mobile Initiative

The Fund will increase our capacity and most importantly accelerate the realisation of our goals such as providing technical support to Institution’s policy validation process, scaling of the sexual harassment reporting system to more institutions,  capacity building and strengthening of sexual harassment prohibition committee members and campus ambassadors/ bystanders, large scale awareness raising across Campus Communities.

The prize will fund our IT infrastructure, the platform support personnel,  and upscaling of the Gender Mobile model to all tertiary education institutions in Nigeria and our systematic data-driven approach would have resulted in an increase in the reportage and reduction in incidents of sexual harassment on Campus.

My childhood experience as a victim of sexual abuse at the age of fourteen defined my career path as a lawyer. However, loosing my best friend to an unsafe abortion of a pregnancy she got off a rape incident at the age of 12 propelled me to launch Gender Mobile Initiative essentially to bridge the existing gaps in terms of effective channels for confidential reporting and access to emergency response services through technology adoption. This effort launched with a 24/7 call centre infrastructure and a web-based platform to report, access counseling,  legal advisory and information-based referral. Within one year of launch, the Data generated from our call centre portrayed tertiary institutions as the centreport of sexual harassment with 81% of the report emanating from different campus communities. This served as a launch pad to work with this unique community of interest. Our vision is to create safe environments of learning free from every form of sexual assault.

Our goal in 3 years is to have 200 Tertiary Institutions demonstrate zero-tolerance for sexual assault by implementing a policy, constituting an inclusive Sexual Harassment Prohibition Committee, activate a bystander intervention and the mobile app download by a substantial number of members of the Campus Community.

Sexual harassment has assumed critical dimensions in Institutions and multi-country studies continue to reveal its prevalence and manifestation  as a pattern of violence that is gendered and power-centred. A reference is the UK National Union of Students (NUS) 2018 report on Sexual misconduct of academic staff in UK Universities. It revealed that 752 (41%) out of 1,839 respondents had experienced at least an instance of sexualized behaviour, while a further 94 (5%) know someone experiencing this, most being females. In Australia, a NUS survey revealed that 1 in 10 female students have experienced a form of sexual violence at an Australian university (Mackintosh, 2011).
In Nigeria, a research by Owoaje and Olusola Taiwo revealed that 69.8% of respondents who were females had been sexually harassed with the main perpetrators being male classmates and lecturers

research attributed this to under-reportage, lack of anti-sexual harassment policies, poor institutional response and lack of effective grievance redressal mechanism. These gaps are a function of a combination of factors such as  lack of confidential/anonymous reporting channels, lack of comprehensive policies and the absence of a proactive bystander intervention.

Our solution is anchored on a tripartite approach centred around policy design, bystander intervention and technology adoption.

There is a growing body of evidence to establish that when reporting becomes the new norm, this is likely to deter perpetrators. It indicated that over 80% of sexual harassment are committed by repeat offenders because the culture of silence further enables violence to thrive. Hence, our value proposition and innovation is embedded in our three-pronged comprehensive approach and a potential user will engage with our services primarily because our mobile application is a feature-rich platform with confidentiality-driven reporting, reported case tracking, support community/safe space that supports proactive bystander intervention,  information escrow/perpetrator matching which matches common harasser of different victims, learning Centre to access policies, case appeal and onboarding information feature. We have a diverse team of Researchers and Data Scientists, who help gather incident data, analyze and build models from it. Hence this platform will also help generate disaggregated data which will inform better programs and policies

Our intervention is evidence-based and we have strategically engaged our community of interest as actors, partners and beneficiaries which is central to achieving impact. We have established collaboration with organizations with common interest and goal on certain components of our work to create a community of practice. Such organization as Tribe XX Lab is focused on capacity building of bystanders in some institutions. Other partner agencies of Government include National Orientation Agency, Independent Corrupt Practices and other related crimes Commission, National Human Rights Commission.

The partnership model wherein institutions voluntarily express interest, sign a Memorandum of Understanding, and drive the policy validation process continues to foster local and institutional ownership thereby enhancing sustainability. Our partnership with the National Association of Nigerian Students helped achieve inclusion by incorporating students as critical stakeholders who share in the responsibility to end campus sexual assault. So far, We are in partnership with 101 tertiary institutions and 18 of them have completed their policy validation process with others ongoing.