01.
Empower Widows
SOWIN offers grants to widows in the amounts of $300 to $1,500, to start a small business. Businesses types vary, including tailor, market stalls, mobile phone booth sales, pure water sales, and second-hand clothes shops.
While gaining access to small business grants is an important step for widows, it isn’t always enough to provide real financial stability. SOWIN goes beyond grants and offers many services such as market research, pricing goods, business planning and training, money management, opening bank accounts, and understanding their rights and responsibilities.
With these grants and education, widows can feed their families, send their children to school, pay for healthcare and move from poverty to economic self-sufficiency.
02.
Engange Men as Allies
It is often the men who carry out the economic devastation to widows. For example, it is the husband’s male relatives, who deny widows access to their husband’s land or property.
SOWIN believes that engaging men as allies is critical to our mission to change social and cultural norms towards Nigerian widows.
To engage men as allies, SOWIN holds seminars with men to:
• Discuss the treatment of widows, and the human rights of widows as covered by The Nigerian Constitution
• Will writing - partner with local attorneys to offer Will writing free of charge
• Encourage men to educate their sons, daughters and other men on the treatment of widows
• Encourage their wives to become economically independent
03.
Educate Women
While men carry out the economic desolation to widows, it is often the wives within
the extended family who carry out/enforce the degrading rituals associated with widowhood, such as:
• Forcing the widow to sleep with the corpse of the husband until burial
• Refraining the widow from bathing for a number of days
• Forcing the widow to drink the water with which the corpse was bathed
To curtail these rituals, SOWIN holds seminars with women to:
• Encourage them to desist from being custodians of these degrading customs and traditions
• Educate them on the human rights of widows, as covered by The Nigerian Constitution. (The
constitution contains a bill of rights that protects citizens from cruel and degrading treatment,
punishment, loss of privacy, and loss of property)
• Encourage them to attain some type of economic independence from their husbands
