An Entrepreneur Takes on Female Representation in Nigeria

In 2018, Odunayo Eweniyi was just five years out of university and had already founded two companies, the second of which, PiggyVest, had just raised $1.1 million in funding.

Today, Eweniyi is a successful entrepreneur and budding investor who is leaning more into her activist side. That is why she co-founded the Feminist Coalition, a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the representation and socio-economic empowerment of women across Nigerian society. For its first project, the organisation supported the #EndSARS protests that swept Nigeria in 2020, and held a food drive for low-income women in December.

Nigeria’s population of 200 million people is made up of 50.8% men and 49.2% women — and women still get the short end of the stick on most growth and developmental indices.

According to the International Parliamentary Union, for example, women make up less than 6% of Nigeria’s parliament — with Nigeria today having one of Africa’s lowest rates of female parliamentary representation, and globally ranking 181 of 193 countries.

GC: Why did you start the Feminist Coalition?

Eweniyi: In July 2020, I’d been thinking about what the difference between the people in power — in this case men — was and I was able to realise that the differences crystallised into two things: money and power. All the people at the top of the food chain in Nigeria have both — not one or the other, both. And because of that women are unable to get in positions of freedom and a place where they can start to push for equality as a next step.

So the entire goal of Feminist Coalition is to ensure the representation of women across all stages — getting women who think alike into politics, health and safety of women, and just general drilling down to the centre of issues women are facing and solving it from the inside out.