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Obiageli Ezekwesili, cofounder of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, clings to hope that girls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants a year ago will return home
(Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not the Thomson Reuters Foundation)
Obiageli Ezekwesili, cofounder of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, clings to hope.
It's been over a year since Boko Haram militants stormed a high school dormitory in northern Nigeria and kidnapped 276 girls. Today 219 remain missing.
"I believe in miracles," Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian minister of education and now an adviser at the Open Society Foundations, told a packed audience at Tina Brown's Women in the World Summit in New York City.
"They're somewhere on the face of the planet and they must be found and they will be found."
Judging by past actions of the extreme Islamist group, the girls probably have been dispersed and some forced into sexual slavery for Boko Haram's fighters, said Alexis Okeowo, a journalist and author who has written extensively about extremist groups in Africa.
She said there is some hope that Nigeria's President-elect Muhammadu Buhari can be more effective in galvanizing the search for the girls than former President Goodluck Jonathan.
A retired general who vowed to make fighting Boko Haram a priority, Buhari also has said that he will clean up corruption, which has plagued the Nigerian military and left it under-equipped and in disarray.
If the girls are found, returning home may pose fresh problems, said Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, who operates St. Monica's Girls Tailoring Centre in the northern Ugandan city of Gulu. She also spoke at Women in the World.
Since 2002, St. Monica's has sheltered and educated over 2,000 young women and girls who were abducted and turned into child soldiers and sex slaves for the Lord's Resistance Army, the brutal rebel group that originated in Uganda under Joseph Kony, who was indicted for crimes against humanity.
Not only are these girls traumatised, they often return pregnant or with children fathered by rebels. Often shunned by their families, "they belong nowhere," Nyirumbe said.
St. Monica's gives them a temporary home, where they are welcomed with their children. Services are provided to help the young mothers begin to bond with children who often represent reminders of rape and violence, she said.
The former abductees also are taught to make dresses, purses and other goods so that they can earn a livelihood.
"To me, we are actually mending the broken lives of these girls," said Nyirumbe, who plans to start a similar programme in war-torn South Sudan.
"When the rebels are fighting anywhere in the world, they target women and girls, the most vulnerable," she said.
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