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Women suffer more during conflicts, should be protected – British High Commission, Rowe
In commemoration of the International Day of Women in Diplomacy, the Head of Development Cooperation at the British High Commission, Cynthia Rowe, speaks with DEBORAH MUSA about her journey in diplomacy, the importance of women’s leadership, and the UK’s development priorities in Nigeria
Could you tell us about some of the privileges your job entails?
I think that my job is a massive privilege. This job has allowed me to work in a number of different countries. I’ve worked in countries from Jordan to Tanzania to Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Nepal.
I’ve also done work in Vietnam, Ghana, and Zambia. So, it’s been an incredible journey across different countries, and that means I have met some amazing people, some really inspiring people, and it also means I feel part of world events, both as a witness and also as someone who’s able to shape, in a very small way, some of those world events.
That is sort of what this job has given me. I mean, in terms of me personally, I have grown up and spent much of my career in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, as well as the UK. So that’s all been a lot of fun.
Tell me about your role at the High Commission
The role is fantastic. The job here is really big, and I really enjoy it, and it means a couple of things. One is that I have to look at the geopolitics. I have to look at the regional politics as well as the context of Nigeria and UK themselves and try and understand what’s going on in order to get the best out of what we’re trying to do here.
That includes trying to think ahead on what’s happening and also it means building relationships and what we’ve got here in Nigeria is what we describe as a really modern development partnership. It’s one of the new ways that we’re doing development in the UK, and with our partners, and the area that I cover is really big, which I love.
So, it covers economic growth, mutual economic growth between the UK and Nigeria. We look at ways to get the economy going and more importantly, benefiting Nigerian citizens across the board. It includes the work we do around security, around humanitarian work, around peace building, especially where there are some conflicts across the country.
It also includes the work we do on climate and climate resilience, which affects people in so many different ways, and it also includes how we partner with Nigeria to build up its health systems, its education systems and the governance cycle. We don’t get involved in politics, but we get involved in the electoral process. So, it’s a really massive job. The upshot of that, actually, is that my main objective is to try and see Nigeria succeed. It is in everyone’s interest. It’s in the UK’s interest. It’s in our interest. It’s in Nigeria’s interest. Regional, continental, and global, to see Nigeria succeed, and that is what gets me out of bed every day.
What inspired your career trajectory?
I grew up between two worlds. I grew up in different countries in Africa, and as well as the UK. I think I come from a family where there was already a real sense of fairness, so we would have big arguments around the table about what was fair and just. We’re quite a vocational family. My father – although I didn’t realise it at the time – also worked in development.
My mother was a teacher and later became a professor, so, I think I grew up with this sense of things ought to be fair and accessible to everyone, and then I’ve got a real strong personal sense that where you are born and what you are born into is luck, and the thing that holds back most people is opportunity, and then if I link that together with the fact that I really like solving problems.
It can be as small as tidying up through to, you know, trying to help a country to work. I love to solve problems. So, I think if you put all of that together, that’s what’s brought me to this place. I think the thing that really coalesced it for me in my mind was when I was about 16 or 17, and I had a best friend in the UK, and I also had a best friend in Tanzania.
I realised when we were hanging out one day that they were exactly the same person. They lived completely different lives. They would never meet each other. One came from a small village in Tanzania, one from a small village in the UK, but they were the same person and for me, that just meant, you know what, everyone is the same.
As a senior British diplomat in Nigeria, how would you describe your experiences so far?
It’s been overwhelmingly positive. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been challenges, but overwhelmingly it’s been really positive, and I feel like I’ve really been welcomed in. I feel there’s a real, especially as a female, there’s a real sense of sisterhood, very quickly and very often, which I really love.
But there’s also been a lot of things I’ve had to get used to, which are also Nigeria-specific, but also being a woman. One of these is being a small woman in a crowd of very large men. Right? So, you know, I often find when I go to events – you would have seen this yourself – there is a big crowd around, whether it’s the minister or the governor or whoever. And I think as a woman, you have to decide how you are going to deal with that.
I think that women bring different qualities and a different tone. One of the things that I found is that I’ve had to think about, especially as I was growing through my career, I’ve had to think about how I take my place at the table. So, one of the most annoying things which women will know is that when you walk into a room, especially as you are a younger person in your career, the immediate assumption is that you’re there to make the tea or take the notes.
So, just not allowing people to put you in a box, taking your place at the table and speaking up is something that I’ve learned increasingly to do as I’ve got older and as I’ve got into more and more senior roles; it’s not about seniority, it’s about taking your place at the table. I also think we women do things in a different way. We use a lot more emotional intelligence, so I think I connect to people in a different way, and I also think that women throughout their lives have always had to find pathways to get things done.
So, there isn’t really a world in which, you know, sort of brute force and banging your hand on the table and telling people what to do has worked for women. Men do that, but it doesn’t work for women. I think we’re really clever at looking at a full picture of things and thinking that’s where I want to go, and then finding a pathway that is different to other people. So that’s a real strength that I use in my diplomacy, especially here in Nigeria, which is very male-oriented.
How does the commission’s development initiatives address the issue of gender equality?
As the British High Commission, the UK government – right from the very top – from the prime minister through our foreign secretary, our minister for development. We are all really, really clear that women and girls are a really high priority, and our work here, I’m absolutely clear, needs to include results for women and girls, and it has to run through everything that we do.
It’s not something that sits on the side. It’s not about giving women, you know, some small livelihoods or small jobs. Those are really important. But for me, it’s about getting women into economics, economic participation without women. This country’s economy will not achieve as much as it is able in terms of having women in politics, and we know that the statistics aren’t great in terms of women in politics in Nigeria, and people are working on that, but it’s really important that they’re in, and it means involving women in peacebuilding.
So, we know that peace lasts longer and it’s more effective if women are involved in it. It’s about protecting women from violence in a number of different ways, whether it’s in humanitarian or conflict situations or whether it’s at home or whether it’s through the systems and through the institutions.
It’s protection through there as well and advancement through there, and also, I think in a time where we are seeing globally a push on women’s rights, on things we thought had been resolved, like family planning, for example, having autonomy over your own body. I think where we’re seeing that being pushed back is really important. It’s the UK. And for me personally, that we stand up for these hard-won rights that our mothers and grandmothers fought for. Women should benefit from agricultural programmes; our economic participation and we are looking at lending to female led businesses at affordable bank rates.
June 19 is the International Day for the Elimination of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. But basically, whenever there is conflict, almost the first thing that happens is that women are used as a tool in conflict. The violence against women goes up. Same for humanitarian systems. They are taken, kidnapped or used as wives or slaves. They are manipulated and held in ransom. They are also assaulted. The minute anything goes wrong, women become the first target.
So much so that when a crisis happens, the first thing that happens is people start immediately thinking about how to protect women. The other side to that is that women often bear the brunt of keeping the family together, making sure the children are fed. If they have any kind of space at all, they walk miles and miles to IDP camps to keep themselves and their children safe. So, women also bear the brunt of the conflict as well. Men suffer enormously as well, but it’s a separate type of burden that they bear, and so, as the UK, we are really committed to eliminating that through a number of different ways.
What difference would it make to have women lead development programmes in Nigeria?
The first is that it’s a really powerful signal. We have to show by our own behaviour what we think is important, and so when women are involved, it sends a signal to our partners, our implementing partners. It demonstrates to the communities that we work with, our political counterparts, and our government counterparts that we believe in this. Now, we put our money where our mouth is.
It influences how programmes are designed and how they’re delivered because we can identify the specific barriers that stop women and girls from participating, and based on evidence from Nigeria and from similar contexts, it means that we can focus properly on household and community needs, health, education, and water. It means better results for women and children. You need children to grow, be strong and healthy, productive adults and happy adults. So, health and education are really important – getting girls into education – and if they are part of decision making, it also means you get an increasing acceptance of women in those areas.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered and how did you overcome them?
I’ve mentioned a couple of them earlier, which is, you know, taking your seat at the table moment. I think a lot of my challenges have come from situations that I’ve been in. I’ve been in some remarkable situations. For example, one of the things I did was I led the Ebola response in Sierra Leone when the first really big outbreak happened back in 2014/2015. And that was probably the biggest challenge of my career.
We had no idea what we were doing. You know, it was a new thing for everybody. The mortality rate was really high. If you caught Ebola, you were very likely to die. It was an awful situation, and I found myself in a position of analysing what was going on, bringing together all of the resources that we needed to combat it, working with the government, working with the health systems, bringing people from all over the world to try and fight it.
We spent, as the UK, I think it was something like a quarter of a billion pounds in eight months, stopping that outbreak from hitting the rest of the world. It was massive, and I was exhausted by the end of it. I was there for about a year, just over a year, and I sort of came out of it. I think the challenge from that is when you take on these really big jobs is to really focus on what you want to do. Surround yourself with really good people.
The better the people are around you, the better you will be. It’s not a competition. Everybody rises together and also builds in recovery time afterwards. So, at the end of it, I took time away to process what I had been doing, to be very open about processing as well and making sure you’ve got your own personal resilience in place. So, yes, I mean, that was probably my biggest challenge in terms of the job.
Do you have some hope about the future of women’s leadership in global affairs?
I think that when you look around the global system, there are some incredibly powerful women, including Nigerian women like Arjuna Oteh, for example, our own foreign secretary in the UK. There are amazing women in the diplomatic community here in Nigeria, both in the UN, in what was USAID, across the development and diplomatic circles.
If you look beyond diplomacy, you know, there are really influential, sensible women coming up to the ranks. I’m thinking about people like Maryam Islam, I’m thinking about DJ Cuppy, people who are not necessarily connected to diplomacy, but are just sort of powerful voices in the system. You’ve got amazing women in business. I mean, business is actually doing well.
Nigerian women in business, you can see how strong that is. Politics still to come, and I think that’s a work in progress. But women are trying. Journalism! We just talked about this. We absolutely need women in journalism. So, there are some great people in that. Let’s keep that going. Women in creatives, that’s sort of also really important. So, the strength and presence of Nigerian women is really visible to me, and in global affairs, it is really visible to me as well. I think we need to take on some of the big political beasts in the world at the moment. I’d love to see a few more women and bigger voices in what’s happening currently.
What pieces of advice would you give to young women who are passionate about development in society?
I would say that your voice and experience are both valid and are also needed. We need your perspective, and it has nothing to do with age. When you bring a different perspective, it will be more modern, and fresher if you’re a younger person, and then if you combine that with somebody who’s got a wealth of experience and put those two things together, you are super powerful.
So, make sure you consider your voice valid and speak up. Bring your mentors close to you; your allies and other people around you close to you. I would also say focus on the task. Don’t focus on the noise. There’s often a lot of noise around, and for me, the more noise there is means someone’s trying to cover something up or to distract you. Focus on the task.
Decide what is noise and ignore the noise. I would say use your emotional intelligence to get the job done, which is what I mentioned earlier and also don’t let anybody box you in. Don’t let anybody tell you what you should be doing, especially as a woman. People like to put you in certain places, right? Just ignore it. You don’t even have to fight it. You just ignore it. Figure out what it is you want to do and go for it, and then I would also say prepare, prepare, prepare.
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