After more than a decade working across humanitarian and social-impact initiatives, Dr Ruqqaya Ahmed is taking on a new challenge: expanding a women- and girl-focused organisation from a limited presence into a nationwide platform for safety, empowerment and advocacy.
Ahmed has been appointed President of Guardian Girls Nigeria, the gender-focused arm of Koyamada International Foundation Nigeria. She is now working to establish structures that will allow the organisation to expand its programmes and reach women and girls across Nigeria.
Guardian Girls Nigeria is part of Guardian Girls International, an organisation founded by Japanese actor Shin Koyamada that operates in 27 countries and has partnered with the United Nations Population Fund since 2019. Its work includes teaching girls self-defence and working with police gender units to improve responses to reports of abuse.
For Ahmed, the new role brings together several strands of work she has pursued throughout her career. She has held leadership positions with organisations including Pink October and Queen’s Care and Empowerment Foundation, alongside experience in the private sector and other social-impact initiatives.
Her immediate task is to build a stronger Nigerian structure around the organisation’s programmes.
Guardian Girls Nigeria plans to introduce six initiatives covering self-defence, police engagement, women’s dialogue and community-based empowerment. These include Guardian Girls Defence, Guardian Girls Police, Nigerian Women’s Dialogue, Holy Women Initiative, Isese Initiative and Amana Women Initiative.
Guardian Girls Defence will work with the Nigerian Karate Federation and other martial arts organisations to equip women and girls with practical self-defence skills.
The Guardian Girls Police programme will take a different approach, working directly with gender units of the Nigeria Police Force to encourage more effective responses to cases involving violence against women and girls. The initiative is also designed to help survivors access appropriate support while cases are handled through lawful processes.
Ahmed’s strategy also recognises that programmes for women cannot always operate from one cultural or religious framework.
The Nigerian Women’s Dialogue will bring together stakeholders to discuss issues affecting women and develop practical responses, while the Holy Women, Isese and Amana Women initiatives are designed to work within Christian, traditional religious and Muslim communities respectively.
That community-based approach could be important for an organisation seeking to move beyond isolated interventions and build a national network.
Rather than expecting one model to work identically everywhere, the organisation intends to work through existing community structures and partnerships while adapting its programmes to different groups.
The emphasis is also broader than protection from violence.
Ahmed says the organisation’s programmes will incorporate skills acquisition, education and financial empowerment, with the wider objective of helping women and girls develop the knowledge, confidence and economic opportunities needed to improve their wellbeing.
This reflects a broader understanding of women’s safety. Protection from violence is important, but so are the economic, educational and social conditions that determine how much agency women have over their lives.
Guardian Girls Nigeria is therefore positioning its next phase around several connected issues: preventing violence, helping girls protect themselves, improving institutional responses, creating opportunities and giving women spaces to participate in conversations about their own futures.
For Ahmed, the challenge will be turning that broad ambition into programmes that can work consistently across different communities.
Her stated goal is for Guardian Girls Nigeria to develop a meaningful presence not only at the national level but within communities across the country.
If that expansion succeeds, the organisation could provide a wider network through which girls can access self-defence training, women can find empowerment opportunities and survivors can receive better support.
For Ahmed, the new role is therefore more than a leadership appointment. It is an opportunity to build an organisation capable of taking women’s safety and empowerment from individual programmes into communities across Nigeria.
