HealBridge runs six programmes. They exist because these are the six things that decide whether leaving lasts, and because a woman who receives only one of them very often goes back.
That is the whole design principle. A shelter bed on its own solves one night and creates a woman with nowhere to go in three weeks. Six things together solve a year, and a year is usually long enough for the ground to become solid.
Safe housing
Somewhere to stay that the person who harmed you does not know about, arranged the same day where it is needed.
That covers emergency nights, longer stays while something permanent is found, and in some cases acting as guarantor so that a woman can hold a tenancy in her own name. The guarantor problem is worth naming, because it is the single most common reason a woman with a job and a plan still cannot rent a room. What the options are is set out separately.
Work and income
Paid work with a real contract, through employers who have agreed in advance how to handle an address and an unexpected telephone call.
It also covers the documents a job needs, interview preparation, and transport for the first weeks before the first salary arrives. That last part is small and decisive. A woman who cannot afford the journey to work for three weeks does not keep the job.
This is the programme that most often determines the outcome, because money is the reason women return more than fear is. Returning to work after years out deals with the gap on the form and the confidence problem behind it.
Counselling and health
Trauma informed counselling for women, and separately for children, in a language they are comfortable in.
Medical care for injuries, and for the conditions that go untreated for years because there was never a safe time to go to a clinic. Many women arrive with something entirely unrelated to violence that has simply been ignored since 2019.
Children respond to counselling faster than adults do, which is one of the few genuinely hopeful facts in this subject.
Legal protection
A lawyer who has done these cases before, which is not the same as a lawyer.
Applications for protection orders, advice on divorce or judicial separation, custody, maintenance and property. And somebody beside you at the police station, which changes the reception more than it should have to.
Children in school
School fees, uniforms, books, and the negotiation required to keep a place or find a new one quickly.
Children who lose their school lose the last stable thing in their week at exactly the moment everything else has changed, and that loss shows up years later in ways that are expensive to repair. Keeping a school place is cheaper than almost anything else we do and it does more.
Transport to safety
The journey itself, at the hour it is safe to travel.
It sounds small next to the others and it is the request we receive most often at short notice. It is frequently the difference between a plan and an event.
How the money is accounted for
Every naira in and every naira out is published. Where a figure is not yet published on this site it is marked as missing rather than estimated, which is why you will see some placeholders here rather than confident numbers.
If you fund a programme you receive the record of what it paid for. You do not receive the name, the photograph or the story of the woman it paid for, because that is hers to give and not ours. That rule has cost us funding and we are keeping it.
How to reach any of them
One route. Contact us and say what you need, or say that you do not know what you need, which is a perfectly normal way to start and how a great many conversations begin.
What happens after you make contact sets out who reads it, what we ask and what we never do.
For organisations
We do not ask employers and professionals for money first. We ask for the things a woman needs in order to leave and to stay left. Work, a roof, treatment, and somebody qualified to tell her where she stands.
What an employer can offer costs very little and is worth more than the equivalent in cash.
Questions people ask
Do I have to leave my marriage to receive help?
No. Many of the women we work with stay, at least at first, and the programmes are available either way.
Is there a cost?
No.
Can I get help with only one thing?
Yes. Plenty of women want one specific piece of help and nothing else, and that is a complete request.
How do I know the money is spent properly?
Every naira in and out is published, and if you fund a programme you receive the record of what it paid for.
If you need help now
If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, call or send a message to +2348025170267, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.
Before you rely on anything on this page
We publish these articles so that you can understand a subject and work out what to ask for. They are written carefully and in good faith. They are still general information about how things usually work, and not advice about your situation, which we do not know.
- This is not legal advice.
- We are not a law firm. Criminal law in Nigeria is largely a state matter, the VAPP Act applies in a state only if that state adopted it, and statutory, customary and Islamic marriages are governed by different law and different courts. Two people with the same facts can have genuinely different options. Get advice from a lawyer who practises where you live — and if cost is the obstacle, ask us, because arranging that is part of what we do.
- This is not medical advice.
- Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here replaces being examined. Do not delay seeing a doctor, nurse or pharmacist because of something you read here, and do not start, stop or change any treatment on the strength of it. If something is time critical, go and be seen.
- This is not counselling, and it is not financial advice.
- Articles about trauma, sleep, money, debt, renting or starting a business describe what commonly helps. They are not therapy and they are not a recommendation about your own money. Speak to a counsellor, a qualified adviser or your own bank about your circumstances.
- It may be out of date, or wrong for where you are.
- Law changes, services close, numbers stop answering and practice varies by state. We correct what we find, and we cannot promise that every page is current on the day you read it. Where we do not have something confirmed, we say so rather than fill the gap.
- Reading this does not make us your lawyer or your doctor.
- No professional relationship is created by reading an article, and we cannot accept liability for decisions taken on the strength of one. What we can do is help you reach somebody who is qualified to advise you, which is what the legal and health parts of our work exist for.
- We cannot promise an outcome, and we cannot make anybody safe.
- A protection order is a piece of paper backed by an enforcement system that is inconsistent. A plan works until the day it does not. Anybody in this field promising safety is selling something, and the promise itself is dangerous because it stops people planning.
Do not let this notice stop you acting. If you are in immediate danger, call 112. If something is medically urgent, go to a hospital — you do not need a police report to be treated. And if you do not know where to start, that is a normal way to begin: use the contact page and we will take it from there.
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