From a state once classified “Red” for the severity of gender-based violence to “Amber,” Benue is showing what happens when traditional rulers, religious leaders, women, men, and communities decide that harmful practices must no longer define their future.
On a warm day in Benue, the stories came one after another. They were not the familiar stories of women suffering in silence, girls being forced into marriages, or communities defending harmful practices in the name of tradition. They were stories of change.
In Otukpo and Makurdi, members of the Side-by-Side Movement gathered to celebrate a journey that, for many of them, has become deeply personal. They came not only to speak about a project but also to testify to what happens when people begin to question the norms they have inherited and collectively decide to do things differently.
One traditional ruler, known simply as Zaki, offered perhaps the most striking testimony.
“I did not know I was doing a lot of things in ignorance until Side-by-Side came,” he said.
Then came the confession that revealed just how profound the transformation had been.
“I observe that what I was doing to my wife was rape.”
It was a difficult admission but also a powerful measure of change. For Zaki, knowledge had not remained in the training hall. It had travelled from training to reflection, from reflection to personal behaviour, and from personal behaviour to community leadership.
“With the knowledge I currently have, I am now educating our village people,” he added.
That is the story of Side-by-Side in Benue. It is not simply a programme of workshops, campaigns and advocacy, but an attempt to change the ideas, relationships and social structures that allow violence and discrimination against women and girls to persist.
From a Red Alert to a New Reality
The intervention did not begin with celebration. It began with an uncomfortable diagnosis. The Womanity Index had placed Benue State in the Red category in relation to gender-based violence and harmful practices. The finding provided a stark picture of the challenges confronting women and girls in the state and raised a fundamental question: what could be done to move from evidence of a problem to measurable change?
The answer became the Side-by-Side Movement for Gender Justice. Established in Nigeria in 2018 through Christian Aid, with the African Centre for Leadership, Strategy & Development (Centre LSD) serving as the national secretariat, the movement recognised something that conventional approaches to gender justice sometimes overlook—communities are not transformed by laws alone.
Traditional rulers shape social expectations. Religious leaders influence values. Men determine, often more than anyone else, whether discriminatory practices continue inside households. Women and girls must have the confidence and opportunities to claim their rights. Government institutions must have the capacity to respond.
Side-by-Side therefore brought these actors into the same conversation. Its philosophy is built around dignity, justice, faith, collaboration, love for humanity, and integrity. The underlying proposition is simple but profound: if harmful norms are created and sustained by communities, communities must also become the agents of their transformation. The project, titled “Core support for scaling-up the Side-by-Side Movement to mobilize religious and traditional leaders toward the implementation of GBV-related policies across Nigeria,” supported by the Ford Foundation, became the vehicle.
In Benue, the first step was to understand the problem more deeply. A rapid assessment was conducted, followed by an inception meeting with project stakeholders. Government ministries, departments and agencies, civil society organisations, traditional and religious leaders and other actors were engaged and trained.
A review and agenda-setting process followed. The movement developed a new strategy and a policy document to guide its operations. Radio and social media became tools for taking the conversation beyond meeting rooms into homes, marketplaces and communities.
Then the advocacy became more urgent.
When the Law Came Under Threat
One of the most significant battles fought by the movement was over the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act.
The VAPP Act had become an important legal instrument for preventing and responding to violence against women and girls. When efforts emerged at the National Assembly that threatened its continued existence, members of the Side-by-Side Movement did not remain spectators.
They mobilised.
They engaged the National Assembly and challenged the threat to the legislation.
The Act survived.
For the movement, it was a reminder that gender justice requires vigilance beyond the community. Laws matter, but laws only matter when citizens defend them, institutions implement them, and communities understand them.
The movement also helped onboard Benue State into the National Sexual Offenders Register and established Community Prevention Vanguards to strengthen grassroots prevention and response.
The architecture for change was beginning to take shape.
The Numbers Begin to Tell the Story
The most compelling evidence of transformation is not always found in conference halls or policy documents. Sometimes, it is found in what no longer happens.
In Benue, the practice of elopement marriage was halted in the affected communities. Elopement marriage was not simply an act of young people choosing to marry outside established arrangements. Participants described it as a practice in which a girl is taken by a young man, with friends firing guns on a market day to announce the consummation of the marriage. Behind the practice was another social problem: the prohibitive cost of marriage.
The response therefore had to go beyond condemnation. The Och’Idoma intervened by reducing the bride price in his kingdom to N50,000, providing a culturally grounded response to one of the economic pressures associated with the practice.
It was an important lesson in social change: sometimes, changing a harmful practice requires changing the conditions that sustain it.
Tradition Is Not Untouchable
Perhaps the most significant changes are those taking place within the cultural institutions themselves. For generations, female children were traditionally excluded from participating in the burial ceremonies of their fathers in some communities.
That practice has been stopped.
Women are also being formally included in decision-making spaces in religious and traditional institutions, giving them a place in decision-making structures from which they were previously excluded. These may appear to be small institutional adjustments. They are not.
Who sits at the table matters.
Who speaks matters.
Who decides matters.
When women move from being subjects of community decisions to participants in making those decisions, the balance of power begins to change.
And that is where Side-by-Side appears to have understood one of the central challenges of gender justice: women cannot be fully empowered if the institutions that govern their lives remain exclusively male spaces.
The Power of Sitting Together
The transformation has also crossed the boundaries of religion. Side-by-Side has created spaces where Christians and Muslims do more than tolerate one another. They interact, learn and build relationships.
“We now break fast together with Muslims,” one participant said.
Victoria Daaor, Executive Director of Elohim Foundation, described the interfaith dimension of the programme as one of its most valuable outcomes.
The organisation’s hall, she said, had become a meeting point for Side-by-Side activities, strengthening the organisation and giving it greater visibility.
But the benefits went beyond publicity.
The interactions created opportunities for participants from different faith traditions to learn from one another.
Women also began to find their voice.
“Side-by-Side has become a household name,” Daaor said.
Ambassador Onoja offered an unusual metaphor for the movement’s spread. “Side-by-Side has become an infectious disease, and I pray it becomes an epidemic.”
It was a striking choice of words. But in the context of the movement, it captured an important aspiration: that the values of dignity, justice and equality should spread from one person to another, from one family to another and from one community to another.
He similarly described the movement as spreading “like harmattan fire.” For him, the impact is particularly visible among women who had previously been confined to the margins of household and community life.
The woman, he argued, is a helpmate and should be allowed to contribute.
That, he said, is part of the empowerment Side-by-Side has brought to women.
The Men Are Beginning to Listen
One of the most important features of the Benue experience is that the gender conversation has not been left to women.
Men have been deliberately brought into it. And some have discovered that gender equality challenges deeply held assumptions about masculinity.
One participant recalled that he used to consider himself a feminist simply because he went everywhere with his wife.
“I was called a woman wrapper,” he said. But training changed his understanding.
“My wife does not only need my respect because she is a wife. But because she is a human being.”
That distinction is crucial.
Respecting a woman because she is someone’s wife still defines her value through her relationship to a man. Respecting her because she is human recognises her inherent dignity.
The participant came to another conclusion: “There is a need for men to be engaged, to effectively fight for the rights of women, and this can only happen through training.”
It is perhaps one of the most important lessons from the Side-by-Side experience.
Gender justice cannot be achieved by women alone. Men must confront the privileges, assumptions and behaviours that sustain inequality. Traditional rulers must be willing to question customs. Religious leaders must examine teachings and practices. Government institutions must enforce laws. Communities must create new norms.
Everyone has a role.
When Empowerment Comes Home
There is another dimension to gender justice that is often missing from public conversations: economics.
A woman without economic power may find it difficult to negotiate power within the household. Economic dependence can reinforce silence. Poverty can also create conditions in which families become vulnerable to harmful practices.
This is why the livelihood component of the Side-by-Side intervention is significant. In Makurdi, one woman participant described her transformation in remarkably simple terms:
“Through Side-by-Side, I, a nobody before, have become somebody.”
Her journey began with what appeared to be a modest intervention.
“From the transport money I got, I established Masa business.”
She started with one Mudu.
Today, she sells in bags.
But the real measure of the transformation is not simply the growth of her business. It is what that income has enabled her to do.
“I am now able to pay my son’s school fees and feeding better.”
In Otukpo, another woman participant offered an equally powerful testimony about the livelihood training:
“From the money I was paid during the training on livelihood, I started Kunu business. Through the business, I was able to save money enough to buy a deep freezer that I use for my business. I thank Side-by-Side for opening our eyes.”
Her story captures something statistics sometimes fail to communicate.
A training opportunity became a business.
The business became savings.
The savings became a productive asset.
And the asset became a potential to make the business more sustainable.
That is empowerment in practical terms.
It demonstrates why gender justice cannot be reduced to protecting women from violence after it occurs. Economic agency matters. Voice matters. Knowledge matters. The ability of a woman to make decisions about her own life matters.
The woman who started a Kunu business may appear to have taken a small step. But small steps, when repeated across communities, can become the foundation of profound social change.
Her final words, “I thank Side-by-Side for opening our eyes”, may be even more significant than the deep freezer. Because opening the eyes is the beginning of transformation.
Beyond a Project
The Benue experience raises a bigger question.
What happens when the project ends?
Can the changes survive beyond donor funding, workshops and campaigns?
The answer will depend on whether the movement has succeeded in embedding new values within the institutions and relationships that govern everyday life.
There are encouraging signs.
A new strategy has been developed. A policy framework is in place. Community Prevention Vanguards have been established. Traditional and religious leaders have been trained. Women are entering decision-making spaces. Government actors and civil society organisations have been engaged. Interfaith relationships have been strengthened.
Most importantly, some communities are beginning to tell a different story about what is acceptable.
The shift from Red to Amber on the Womanity Index is therefore more than a colour change.
It represents a movement from diagnosis to action.
But Amber is not Green.
It is a warning that progress has been made, but the work is not finished.
The danger of celebrating success too early is that communities may lose the urgency that produced the progress in the first place.
The challenge now is to institutionalise the gains, deepen community ownership, sustain the prevention structures and ensure that the reduction in violence becomes permanent rather than temporary.
A Different Kind of Revolution
Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Side-by-Side is that it has not sought to change Benue from outside.
It has worked from within.
It has entered the spaces where tradition is interpreted, where faith is practised, where families are governed and where community decisions are made.
It has challenged men without excluding them.
It has engaged traditional rulers without dismissing tradition.
It has worked with religious leaders rather than treating religion as the enemy.
It has empowered women while inviting men to become allies.
And it has demonstrated that advocacy is most powerful when it is connected to everyday realities.
The story of Benue is therefore not simply a story about a project.
It is a story about what becomes possible when people who once accepted harmful practices as normal begin to ask a different question:
What if we can do better?
Zaki’s confession provides perhaps the clearest answer.
He did not know.
Then he learnt.
He reflected.
He changed.
And now he teaches others.
That is how social transformation often begins, not with a grand declaration, but with one person discovering that what was once considered normal was wrong.
Then another person learns.
Then another.
Until the community itself begins to change.
Benue has moved from Red to Amber.
The real test now is whether the fire of change can continue to spread, until the colour changes again, and the values of dignity, justice and equality become not the language of a movement, but the ordinary reality of everyday life.
Osasah wrote from #3B, Niger Avenue, Apo, Abuja
monosasah@gmail.com
