Zainab Monisola Olaitan, from Nigeria, is a 2022 MMEG grantee who used the award to complete her doctoral degree at the University of Pretoria in record time (2.5 years) by the age of 27. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria.
Zainab’s research spans several areas, with an overall focus on women’s representation across different spheres. For her master’s, she investigated how women transformed themselves from victims of war in Sierra Leone into participants in peace building, as well as the limitations to that involvement often created by male-dominated institutions.
In her doctoral thesis, she examined the impact that gender quotas and female numeric participation in politics has on women’s lives in South Africa and Botswana. Her research questioned the assumption that the involvement of politically engaged women has an obvious positive effect on women generally. She appreciates the value of applied research, creating connections between research at the local level and the development of regional and national policies.
Finally, Zainab’s current research as a post-doctoral fellow focuses on the role of women’s political participation in the implementation of sexual and reproductive health and rights across Africa.
During her career as a scholar, Zainab has received scholarships from the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, and the University of Pretoria Postgraduate Doctoral Scholarship to support her academic and research journey. She is a prolific writer, with many academic articles to her credit.
Zainab is deeply concerned by the current growth of anti-human rights legislation on the continent, for example the new laws against LGBTQ people in Uganda and Ghana and the attempt in The Gambia to reverse the prohibition against FGM. In 2023 she presented a paper on the role of parliamentarians in repealing anti-rights legislation at a conference on the protection of sexual and gender minorities organized by the Centre for Human Rights. She intends to do further research on the negative consequences of anti-rights legislation in Africa.
Zainab says that the MMEG grant was instrumental in enabling her to complete her PhD in record time. This has consolidated her academic career especially in the human rights space, where she engages in research, teaching, and publishing to advance the protection and promotion of human rights in an environment that can seem increasingly hostile. MMEG is proud to have supported the early stages of what we believe will be a long and illustrious career.
Zainab keeps in touch with her high school, Ogijo Community High School, via the school’s alumni association, which raises money for new facilities and organizes extra-curricular talks for the students. Importantly, she serves as a role model for girls of what is possible in their futures and visits in person when she visits her home town of Oglijo in Nigeria’s Ogun state. She was a star debater at school and was the best female debater at the 2015 and 2016 All-Nigeria Universities Debating Championships (ANUDC). This skill has served her well in all her public-speaking engagements, notably at academic conferences and lectures.
During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Zainab and her friend Simotwo Zainabu launched AfroTada (Africa Awakening), an online platform that aims to curate and preserve African stories and content. The whole project is currently volunteer-managed and run, with the ambition of keeping the digital library access free and available to everyone. The easy-to-navigate platform AfroTada is not only a knowledge library but also a learning space for volunteers to develop and consolidate their technical skills, which has translated into them getting jobs in the tech world. The latest iteration of the website was launched in early 2024, and it is open to contributions from all over Africa. Writers can sign up on the system and write/upload their articles, which are then reviewed for suitability by a team of editors. Zainab observes that Afro Tada’s vision is “audacious” in scale, so different categories are being introduced incrementally to achieve the original broad vision. Additionally, to sustain AfroTada, Zainab and Simotwo are working on getting grants and funding.
Zainab is a dynamo, already excelling in many areas at a young age. MMEG looks forward to seeing what she will do next.
