WHEN WOMEN ARE TOOLS OF WAR, THERE CAN BE NO EQUITY

TRIGGER WARNING - SEXUAL VIOLENCE IS DISCUSSED IN THIS BLOG.

AMEF is a female-led organization working with women and girls affected by conflict, poverty and gender-based violence in a patriarchal society, within the South West region of #Cameroon. AMEF and Street Child have been working together for three years, and as a contribution to the 38th commemoration of International Women’s Day, AMEF’s Executive Director Atim Evenye wrote this blog.

The theme for this International Women’s Day is #EmbraceEquity, and DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality sits within the broader theme.  I would like to talk about what this means for women and girls in Cameroon, where schooling for women and girls remains a cause for concern. This is especially problematic in the present context of crisis, where women are routinely used as a tool of war – but where women are also resilient, determined, and right at the center of peacebuilding. I would like to tell Rose’s story.

Rose was just 18 when non-state actors in her region of Cameroon burst into her home, looking for her younger brother. They wanted him to join the conflict, to be a child soldier, but he wasn’t home. So, they took her instead, first raping her so many times (in front of her parents) that she passed out.

When she woke up, she found herself captive in the bush, unable to leave. At first the men kept her tied up, freeing her only to cook for them. They watched every move she made, so she couldn’t escape. But after six months they untied her, believing they had broken her resolve. They were wrong; Rose had been planning. She waited until the right moment, and then ran away back to her family.

Her family was no longer safe in their village so they fled to neighboring Nigeria, where they settled in a refugee camp. After two years they thought it would be safe to return, so they moved back to a different village within the same vicinity. Rose decided she wanted to go back to school, but education has been one of the main drivers of the conflict in the Anglophone region, and she and her friends were ambushed on the way to school one day. Rose was raped again, and this time she became pregnant. 

Ultimately, Rose was abandoned by her perpetrators. She decided to keep the baby, who is now one year old, and she has finally gone back to school.

My reason for narrating this story is to portray how women and girls have become tools of war; pawns in the conflict between the government and the non-state armed group (NSAGs), which makes their already vulnerable situation even more precarious. Mostly the NSAGs target younger girls, who do not yet have the confidence to speak out. They ambush them, strip them naked, post pictures of them on social media as a form of control, so they do what the men want. This only deters others from going to school and accessing digital facilities. There are ten regions in Cameroon, and in total five of them are in conflict. Other forms of gender-based violence are prevalent across all the regions, including intimate partner violence and early forced marriages which affect a cross-section of the population. 

And where women become commodities or tools in conflict, there cannot be equity.

The psychosocial aspect is the most significant. It takes time to heal from these intensely traumatic experiences, and the stigma once they speak out can be huge. These girls cannot be taken out of the community, due to lack of resources. Moreover, safe spaces created are not sustained due to poor localization strategies and external NGOs who come and go without adequate transfer of skills at the local level. Thus, there is a huge need for local funding.

The AMEF team did an assessment in some of the communities greatly affected by NSAG attacks, in the South West Region, and a project was developed, (now funded by Together Women Rise #RISE). In the course of this assessment, we found that so many young women aged 15-18 already have children (“children having children” is a concept prevalent in the region) due to persistent violence, economic factors, and peer pressure. But we also found that these girls are resilient! They want to go to school, they want to be involved in peacebuilding. They have a role to play in ending the violence. So we are working with them to provide education, vocational skills training and confidence building.

Women in Cameroon have the power to create and trailblaze change. Eighteen months ago the country hosted our first ever Women’s National Peace Convention, which had over 1,000 representatives in total from all the ten regions of Cameroon. If women were empowered with education, technology, confidence and autonomy; if we lived free from the threat of violence, as is our right, we could end this conflict and bring peace and equity to all Cameroonians.