In 1999, Laila Dogonyaro’s Women Opinion Leaders Forum launched a programme with an ambitious target: 300,000 women for the 2003 elections.
But this was not simply a campaign to get women to vote.
WOLF wanted women educated about politics, involved in democratic processes, prepared to support female candidates and organised at the grassroots. It was an attempt to change how Nigerian women participated in the country’s new democratic era.
The programme was called “300,000 for 2003.”
And behind it was a woman who had spent decades pushing women into spaces where they had often been treated as spectators rather than political actors.
The programme behind the number
Nigeria had just returned to civilian rule in 1999 after years of military government. Elections had returned, political parties were reorganising and the country was beginning another experiment with democratic government.
For women activists, however, the return to democracy did not automatically mean equal political participation.
It was against this background that the Women Opinion Leaders Forum, founded by Laila Dogonyaro in 1998, began organising around the 2003 elections.
A report published by The Punch on 4 March 1999 described WOLF as already embarking on a grassroots mobilisation campaign. The report stated that its programme, tagged “300,000 for 2003,” had been launched the previous month in Abuja by WOLF leader Hajia Laila Dogonyaro.
The objective was clearly stated: to educate, encourage and mobilise women for effective participation in democratic processes.
The 300,000 figure was therefore not the number of women who had already joined WOLF. It was the mobilisation target the organisation had set for the 2003 political cycle.
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What did WOLF actually want these women to do?
The programme went far beyond asking women to turn up on election day.
According to the 1999 report, WOLF planned to conduct enlightenment programmes, encourage women’s participation in politics, promote democratic participation and support female candidates at different levels of election.
It also planned to train and mobilise women who could work towards securing support for female candidates in 2003.
That distinction is important.
WOLF was not treating women merely as voters who could be counted during elections. The organisation wanted women to understand the political process and become active participants within it.
Women could vote.
Women could organise.
Women could mobilise other women.
And women could contest elections.
That was the political idea behind the 300,000 target.
Dame Valerie Young, identified in the report as WOLF’s state mobiliser, explained that the organisation was responding to what it saw as a decline in female participation in the politics of the new democratic dispensation.
Why was 300,000 such a significant target?
The figure becomes easier to understand when placed beside the actual political numbers of the period.
In the 1999 elections, only three women entered the 109-member Senate, while women won 12 of the 360 seats in the House of Representatives.
The 2003 elections brought some increase in female representation. Four women were elected to the Senate and about 21 women entered the House of Representatives, depending on the dataset and treatment of seats. Women also gained representation in state Houses of Assembly.
But women remained a small minority in the elected political class.
That was the environment in which WOLF was trying to work.
The organisation was therefore attempting to build political participation from below: educating women, creating networks and encouraging them to become politically active before the next major election.
Who was behind the programme?
At the centre of the programme was Laila Dogonyaro.
She was not new to women’s activism when WOLF appeared.
Dogonyaro had been involved with Jam’iyyar Matan Arewa, one of the major women’s organisations in Northern Nigeria. She became its secretary by the early 1970s and was involved in its activities around women’s welfare, education and political participation.
She also entered electoral politics herself.
In 1977, she contested the Tudun Wada constituency, at a time when female participation in electoral politics remained extremely limited. She was later associated with the National Party of Nigeria during the Second Republic.
Her political activism continued after the collapse of the Second Republic.
From 1985, she served as Kaduna State chairperson of the National Council of Women Societies, and in 1993 she became national president of the organisation. She remained in that position until 1995.
By the time she founded WOLF in 1998, Dogonyaro had spent decades working within women’s organisations and political networks.
The 300,000 campaign was therefore not an isolated project. It grew out of a much longer career in women’s mobilisation.
WOLF was about more than elections
The name itself Women Opinion Leaders Forum tells part of the story.
The organisation was interested in women who could influence their communities and help other women understand and participate in political processes.
A later WOLF publication, The Women Opinion Leaders Forum (WOLF): Aims, Objectives and Programmes, was documented in research on women’s organisations in Northern Nigeria. The organisation’s stated purpose included increasing women’s participation in elective and appointive political positions.
This explains why the 300,000 target was designed around mobilisation rather than simply voter registration.
A woman who understood the political process could influence other women.
A woman who understood elections could encourage others to vote.
A woman with political connections could help a female candidate.
And a woman who had been trained could eventually become a candidate herself.
The organisation was trying to build that chain.
What happened after the 1999 launch?
The campaign did not disappear after the announcement.
Evidence from the years immediately preceding the 2003 elections shows that WOLF continued organising around women’s political participation.
An electoral knowledge record documents a workshop organised by WOLF on “Enhancing Women’s Active Participation in Democracy”, with a presentation on the “Challenges to Women in the Nigerian Democracy.” The material dates the workshop to August 2002 and the presentation to March 2003.
By this stage, WOLF’s work was taking place alongside a much broader movement of Nigerian women’s organisations preparing for the 2003 elections.
The Federal Government’s report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women recorded that women’s organisations had developed an initiative known as “Agenda 2003”, aimed at raising funds and encouraging women to seek elective office.
On 8 April 2002, a national women’s gathering was held to present women’s political demands and encourage greater participation. More than 8,000 women reportedly attended, representing communities across Nigeria’s 774 local government areas.
The gathering also launched “Women’s Money for Women’s Election,” an effort to raise funds for women seeking office in the 2003 elections. WOLF was listed among the organisations involved in the wider network of women’s organisations.
So the political mobilisation surrounding 2003 had become much larger than one organisation.
WOLF was one part of an expanding network of Nigerian women who were trying to make political participation more organised and financially possible.
Did WOLF reach the 300,000 women?
The surviving records do not give a final figure for the number of women WOLF reached.
What they do show is that the organisation continued its political education and mobilisation activities after the 1999 launch and into the period immediately preceding the 2003 elections.
The 300,000 figure was therefore a target, not a documented final headcount.
Its importance lies in what the target reveals about the organisation’s ambition.
WOLF was thinking in terms of hundreds of thousands of women at a time when the number of women occupying elected national offices was still extremely small.
The organisation wanted to create a much wider political base for women — not just a handful of prominent female politicians.
And what happened in the 2003 elections?
The 2003 election results provide an important measure of the political environment WOLF was trying to influence.
Women did make some gains compared with 1999. Contemporary and later records put female representation in the Senate at about four women and in the House of Representatives at about 21–24 women, depending on the source and counting method.
But women still occupied only a small fraction of the available seats.
There was no woman elected governor in the 2003 elections, while two women emerged as deputy governors.
These figures show both sides of the story.
There was movement.
But there was still a considerable gap between women’s participation and their representation in political office.
And the available records do not establish that WOLF’s 300,000 campaign alone caused any particular electoral outcome. Its work formed part of a much wider mobilisation involving women’s organisations, political parties, government institutions and civil society groups.
Dogonyaro had been building towards this for decades
Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is that the 300,000 campaign did not suddenly appear in Laila Dogonyaro’s life.
Her own experience had brought her into the question of women’s political participation long before WOLF.
She had grown up in Northern Nigeria and received only primary education before her early marriage. Later, she became an advocate for girls’ education and women’s welfare.
She became involved in women’s organisations, worked with Jam’iyyar Matan Arewa, entered electoral politics and eventually rose to the presidency of the National Council of Women Societies.
During her years in women’s leadership, she was involved in efforts to strengthen women’s economic and institutional position. Former women’s activist Kema Chikwe later recalled that during Dogonyaro’s period as NCWS president, there was an attempt to establish a financial institution that could provide women with access to funds at low interest.
Dogonyaro’s activism also extended to issues affecting women’s health and education, including her advocacy around vesico-vaginal fistula and the education of girls.
Then, in 1998, she created WOLF.
One year later, the organisation was already announcing a target of 300,000 women for the next major election cycle.
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The woman behind the number
The story of “300,000 for 2003” is interesting because the number can easily overshadow the woman who created the organisation behind it.
Laila Dogonyaro was working with a simple but ambitious idea: women needed to become more than an audience in Nigerian politics.
They needed political knowledge.
They needed networks.
They needed organisations that could mobilise them.
They needed financial support if they were going to contest elections.
And they needed other women willing to organise alongside them.
The programme launched in Abuja in 1999 was an attempt to build that machinery before the 2003 elections.
The records do not show that WOLF eventually reached exactly 300,000 women. But they do show that the organisation continued its political education work, participated in the wider mobilisation of Nigerian women and remained active around the question of women’s participation as the 2003 elections approached.
Laila Dogonyaro died in April 2011 at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital and was buried at Garki in Jigawa State. She had been honoured with the Officer of the Order of the Niger in 2001 for her activism.
Her “300,000 for 2003” campaign did not transform Nigerian politics overnight.
But it captured something important about the period: women were organising before the 2003 elections not merely to be counted as voters, but to understand politics, influence elections, support female candidates and demand a larger place in the country’s democratic institutions.
And that is what the 300,000 was really about.
Author’s Note: Laila Dogonyaro’s “300,000 for 2003” programme offers a glimpse into an important period in Nigeria’s democratic history, when women’s organisations were deliberately building grassroots political networks and pushing women beyond the role of voters towards active participation in political life.
References
The Punch, 4 March 1999, “Women prepare for 2003 election”, preserved by IFES.
United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, Nigeria’s report on implementation of CEDAW, 2002.
United Nations, “Women and Political Participation in Nigeria”, 2005.
ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, record on women’s participation and WOLF’s democracy workshop.
Vanguard, 30 April 2011, “Woman activist, Laila Dogonyaro laid to rest”.
ConnectNigeria, “Women You Should Know: Laila Dogonyaro”.
M. O. Ojo et al., research on Muslim and Christian women in dialogue in Northern Nigeria, including documentation of WOLF’s aims and programmes.
