A bed for the night is the easiest part of this work to fund, the easiest to explain and the easiest to photograph. It is also the part that changes the least.
Ask a woman who left and went back why she went back, and the answer is almost never that she stopped being afraid. It is that the money ran out, or the room was only available for a fortnight, or the school asked for fees she did not have. Returning is not usually a failure of resolve. It is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic that anybody would recognise.
What a bed solves, and what it does not
Emergency accommodation is genuinely necessary and we fund it. It solves the specific problem of tonight, which on some nights is the only problem worth solving. Nothing below is an argument for having fewer beds.
But a bed has a shape. It is short, it is conditional, and it ends. On the day it ends the woman using it needs somewhere to go, and the list of places she can go is decided almost entirely by whether she has money coming in. If she does not, the list has one item on it, and that item is the house she left.
This is why counting beds is a poor way to measure whether a service works. Beds are a measure of how many nights were covered. They say nothing at all about how many women were still safe six months later, which is the only number anybody actually cares about.
The month after
The dangerous period is not the night of leaving. It is the weeks afterwards, when the immediate crisis has passed, the adrenaline has gone, and the practical problems arrive one after another with no obvious end.
They arrive in a predictable order. Money first, because there is none of her own. Then housing, because a landlord wants a year up front and a guarantor she does not have. Then school, because the fees were his and the children cannot simply stop going. Then documents, because half of them are in a drawer in the house. Then work, because she has no recent reference and a gap on the form she cannot explain without disclosing everything.
Each of these on its own is survivable. Arriving together, in a fortnight, to somebody who is exhausted and grieving and probably being contacted daily by the person she left, they are not. And at the end of that fortnight there is a phone call offering to solve every one of them at once, which is what going back actually feels like from the inside.
Why work is the piece that decides it
Of everything on that list, income is the one that unlocks the others.
A woman with a salary can rent, eventually, because a landlord has something to look at. She can pay fees, or part of them. She can replace documents, travel to a court date, buy a phone that nobody else has ever had access to. She can also do the thing that matters more than any of it, which is make a decision that is not shaped by what she can afford. That is what independence actually consists of, and it is bought with a payslip rather than with encouragement.
It also undoes the specific mechanism that was used against her. Where money was the instrument of control, and it very often was, an income of her own is not a bonus at the end of recovery. It is the reversal of the thing itself. How money is used to keep a woman in a marriage is worth reading alongside this, because it explains why a job is not simply a practical convenience.
What a job has to look like to be worth anything
Not every job helps. A placement that collapses in six weeks does more harm than not placing her at all, because it costs her the belief that this can work.
The ones that hold have four things in common. A contract, so there is something to stand on. Pay into an account in her own name that nobody else can see, which is frequently the first genuinely private thing she has owned in years. An employer who has already been told never to confirm to a caller that she works there. And a named person she can speak to, so she is not explaining herself from the beginning every time something happens.
None of that is expensive. All of it has to be agreed in advance, because the moment a receptionist is asked “is she in today” is not the moment to work out the policy.
The four weeks before the first salary
There is a gap between starting work and being paid, and it is where placements fail.
Transport for those weeks is a small amount of money and it decides the outcome. A woman who cannot afford the journey does not keep the job, and once she has not kept it the employer is less inclined to take the next placement. Clothes for the first week, a phone that works, and the fee for a document she needs to sign a contract belong in the same category. They are unglamorous, they are cheap, and leaving them unfunded wastes everything that was spent on getting her there.
We fund that gap deliberately, and we would rather fund it than fund another week of accommodation, because the week of accommodation buys a week and the transport buys a job.
Housing and work are the same problem
It is tempting to treat them separately. They are not separate.
She cannot rent without income and she struggles to hold a job without somewhere stable to sleep, and in Nigeria the guarantor requirement closes the loop: a woman with a salary and a plan is still refused a room because there is nobody to stand for her. That is why we act as guarantor where we can, and why the housing side is a partnership ask rather than a cash one. A landlord who will accept us as guarantor has done something that money on its own does not buy.
What this means for how we spend
Our programmes are weighted towards income and housing rather than crisis response alone. That is a deliberate allocation and it has a cost: it means we sometimes say that we can help with a job and not with a hotel, which is a harder sentence to say than it is to write down.
It also means our reporting looks different from other services. We publish what each programme spent rather than how many people passed through it, because the number who passed through says nothing about where they are now. How the accounting works is set out separately, including where we have no figure and have said so instead of estimating.
Work and income is one of our six programmes for this reason, and it is the one that most often decides whether the other five were worth funding.
What we are asking for
Not money first. A vacancy, a training place, an apprenticeship, a contract for a service a woman can provide, or a room let to somebody with us standing behind her.
If your organisation has any of those, tell us what it is and we will tell you honestly whether we can use it. What an employer actually has to do is short, and most of it costs nothing.
Questions people ask
Are you saying shelters do not matter?
No. We fund emergency accommodation and there are nights when it is the only thing that matters. The argument is about weighting: a bed covers a night, and income covers the year that decides whether leaving holds.
Why not just give women cash?
We do fund direct costs, including transport, fees and documents. Cash alone runs out, and a woman living on a grant has the same problem in three months that she had on the first night. A contract does not run out in the same way.
What if she does not want to work, or cannot?
Then she is helped anyway, and the other programmes are the whole point of there being six of them. Illness, disability, a new baby and age are all ordinary reasons, and none of them changes what she is offered.
Do you only help women who leave?
No. Many of the women we work with stay, and the support is the same. A woman who stays and has her own income is in a materially different position from one who has none.
Our company has no vacancies. Is there anything else?
Yes. Training places, apprenticeships, work experience, a service contract, or acting as a reference. Property, transport and professional time are all worth more to us than the cash equivalent.
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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