For over a decade, one belief has anchored every project, every workshop, and every community conversation at Grassroot People and Gender Development Center (GRADE): every woman, girl, and marginalized person has the right to live free from violence, discrimination, and exclusion and to have a real say in the shape of her own life.

Since our founding in 2010, that belief has grown into a body of work spanning health, leadership, and economic dignity — reaching over 3,500 women and 4,000 girls and youth across 14+ communities. This is the story of that work, told through the people who lived it.

Why GEWGE, Why Now

Gender inequality doesn’t announce itself in a single dramatic moment. It shows up in an elderly woman who has never had her blood pressure checked. In a girl who has never been told her voice matters in a room full of adults. In a mother who cannot buy a full bag of rice because there is no structure to save the little, she earns. GRADE’s Gender Equality, Women and Girls Empowerment work exists to meet inequality exactly where it lives — in daily, unglamorous, solvable problems — and to solve them alongside the women and girls affected, not for them.

Building Women’s Economic Power, One Contribution at a Time

In 2024, GRADE launched “Put Food on the Table Project” with nine women to pooled small daily contribution of ₦500 into a shared structure dedicated entirely to buying food for their families. The results went beyond groceries. Women who had never had access to structured savings mechanisms built financial discipline, solidarity, and a renewed sense of agency over their households’ wellbeing.

In January 2026, 60 women enrolled voluntarily to the project by saving daily to achieve food security and build economic empowerment. Some of their testimonies are –

“I feel proud knowing that my small daily contribution helps me and my fellow women provide food for our families. It has taught me the value of saving and working together.”— Mummy Chisom

“This is the first time I am buying a bag of rice for my family. My husband is very happy and I am so happy.”— Mummy Faith

It is a small model with a big lesson: economic empowerment doesn’t always require large capital — sometimes it requires structure, trust, and community.

Giving Girls Their Voice — and Their Skills

Nowhere is GRADE’s impact more visible in raw numbers than in girls’ leadership. Through the “Agency Development and Leadership Certification Program”, 230 in-school girls across Igando-Ikotun and surrounding communities received structured training in confidence, communication, advocacy, and GBV prevention. Four Focus Group Discussions surfaced the real challenges girls face — and four graduates were certified as peer trainers, ensuring the program’s impact multiplies beyond GRADE’s own staff.

That momentum carried into the 2024 “International Day of the Girl Child” celebration, where 250 girls from multiple schools came together to mark their own potential.

“The training has taught me how to say no to unpleasant requests and to be a good leader to other girls. — Esther Abah, programme participant

This is what empowerment looks like in practice: not a single workshop, but a pipeline — training girls, then equipping some of them to train others.

Caring for the Women Society Often Forgets

While much of the development sector focuses on youth, GRADE has built a distinctive and deeply needed niche: the health and dignity of “elderly women”.

In December 2025, the “Healthy Ageing Fiesta” brought 35 elderly women (and one man, the oldest 88 years old) together in Igando-Ikotun for a day combining health education, gentle aerobics, beauty and self-care, and — perhaps most powerfully — a colouring and expression activity that helped participants process painful memories and find renewed peace.

Five months later, marking International Women’s Day 2026, GRADE returned to this work with a “community health outreach in Makoko”, delivering free blood pressure screenings, health talks, and medications to elderly women, in partnership with several feminist and women-led organizations.

This work is now backed by evidence: GRADE published a position paper on high blood pressure among grassroot elderly women, drawing directly on both outreaches — turning frontline service delivery into advocacy data that can inform policy and attract further support.

Confronting Violence, Building Safety

Gender equality cannot be separated from safety. Through the **16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence** campaign, GRADE and partners reached 150 grassroots men, women, and young people with sensitization on GBV prevention, child protection, and safeguarding — engaging School-Based Management Committees directly in the schools where children spend their days.

GBV prevention isn’t a standalone campaign for GRADE — it is stitched into nearly everything we do, from the leadership curriculum taught to girls to the safe-space training delivered to Lagos’s female commercial drivers, who in 2023 received a full day of road safety and decent work training in partnership with ActionAid Nigeria.

What Ties It Together

Across health outreaches, savings circles, leadership trainings, and advocacy campaigns, one thread runs through everything: GRADE does not arrive with solutions — it builds them with communities. Every project starts by listening — through focus group discussions, community engagement, and partnership — before a single training is designed or a single contribution is collected.

Twelve years in, that approach has produced a track record we’re proud of, but the deeper story is in the individual outcomes: a girl who has learned to say no, a grandmother whose blood pressure was caught in time, a mother buying her family’s first full bag of rice.

Gender equality, at the grassroots, looks like all of these things at once.