Sociology professor ‘feminises’ Nigeria’s automotive marketplace

Fatima Adamu turned the country’s car mechanic field upside down by schooling women in fixing cars and trucks and trucks and encouraging them enter the male-dominated workforce.

In September 2019, Shamsiyya Bashir, 23, enrolled as an automotive mechanic trainee in Nana Female Automobile Mechanic Garage, an all-lady car workshop, released in Nigeria’s northern condition of Sokoto — a conservative and violence-ridden location of Nigeria.

She is the 1st cohort of 16 learners enrolled into the programme to endure teaching, an apprenticeship and internship alternatives in engineering courses and vehicle products and services. It’s an working experience she had extensive anticipated because her teenage decades.

While expanding up, she watched her father, an automotive mechanical engineer take out car or truck engines and restore brainboxes and other essential elements of vehicles at his mechanic workshop in Kara current market, Sokoto.

“That was the place my interest in automotive mechanical engineering begun from. I watched my dad carry down the car or truck motor, correct it back again and it begun doing work, it was magical to me, and this produced me curious to understand this ability,” Shamsiyya reported.

“So, promptly I received admission into Caliphate School of Health and fitness Technologies in Mabera, Sokoto to study Wellbeing Technological know-how, I realized I experienced gotten what it will take to get into this male-dominated sector but didn’t know how to go about it till I learnt about this female mechanic garage.”

In her to start with few months of instruction, she learnt how to have out typical servicing on vehicles, alternator and cooling fan restore, and is eager to master the skills that are wanted for brainbox maintenance, crankshaft, and motor maintenance. 

But she has experienced to deal with a deep-seated patriarchy which pushes girls into next-class standing in the male-dominated northern modern society. Bashir was ridiculed by her close friends who believe that that the function is only for the adult men. 

“They reported I was losing my time, but it didn’t get to me simply because I like the work and was determined to reach it,” she informed TRT Planet.

For a long time, Nigeria’s northern area has stayed a male stronghold, often earning it challenging for gals and ladies to crack into male-dominated areas. Below, girls’ entry into the workforce is controlled by early marriage and commencing a family members. 

They are confronted with a restricted option of profession, coupled with a lack of training and marginalisation from universities and expertise acquisition programmes. It can be a reflection of the frequent cultural beliefs that girls and women are up versus. 

Nana female auto garage aims to impart technical and entrepreneurial skills in women so they could excel in automotive industry in northern Nigeria.
Nana female auto garage aims to impart technical and entrepreneurial techniques in gals so they could excel in automotive industry in northern Nigeria.
(Courtesy of: Nana Female Vehicle Mechanic Garage)

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