Sandra
Aguebor is the founder of the Lady Mechanic Initiative (LMI), the
CEO of Sandex Car Care Garage and has been a mechanic for 30 years.
Against the will of her mother, who thought it shameful for a
woman to be a mechanic, Sandra started training to be a mechanic at
the age of 14. Her father was supportive, he had been out of the
country a couple of times and had seen female aeronautic engineers,
hence he didn’t see why his daughter couldn’t be an automobile
mechanic if she wanted to. So he took her to the workshop where he
fixed his car and, according to Sandra, once they arrived the
workshop, she immediately fell in love with a dismantled car engine
and refused to leave. Thus began her training. And although she was
still in secondary school, everyday she would leave for her
mechanic training after school hours.
“When I
opened my shop, my name was all over town, “If you go to the Lady
Mechanic, your car will be well taken care of …” I started getting
[so many] jobs, I could not cope anymore, I had to employ
somebody”, she told Aljazeera. That birthed the idea of an
empowerment programme, “I thought why not start empowering women to
be mechanics so that they can open up their own shops…” she
explained.
She
started her empowerment programme training 7 girls and a boy; and
overtime, successfully built a network of female mechanics that is
fast spreading from city to city in Nigeria. Her LMI is dedicated
to training orphans, former sex workers, school dropouts, single
mothers and victims of trafficking to become mechanics. “Lady
Mechanic focuses on the poor.”
One year
into her training, Gift Igbeneweka is one of the many students of
the Lady Mechanic Initiative. Her dream is to finish, open a
workshop of her own and train other women. Gift is a single mother
who lives with her son in a single room in Jakande Estate, Lagos.
Gift is currently good at a few things like changing brake pads and
servicing car engines. The young lady describes herself as a former
“hustling” street girl who was fighting for survival. She migrated
to Lagos from Benin City in search of greener pastures.
Being
the social and commercial hub of the country and playing host to
several multinationals, Lagos is the dream city for millions of
Nigerians and so its population is constantly increasing as people
from all over the country troop in with the hopes for a better
life.
Gift
used to live as a sex worker in a red light district called Kuramo.
There, some women advised her to join the Lady Mechanic Initiative.
She found the idea of women mecahanics intriguing and decided to
give it a go, plus, she was tired of the street life anyway. Her
friends mocked her new decision, asking her to return to
prostitution, but Gift refused. “Lady Mechanic changed my life,”
she said.
Sandra
and her lady trainees often embark on campaign drives where they
spread the gospel of the initiative, speaking to young women and
encouraging them to become Lady Mechanics. According to her, both
the recruiting and training process are not easy, “the girls are
from different parts of Nigeria, different backgrounds and with
different life stories and challenges.” But this woman is
passionate about what she does, “skills change lives; transforming
a life from nowhere to somewhere, giving hope to the hopeless girl.
Now, she’s an entrepreneur. Now, she’s taking other girls off the
street. Now she has dignity as a woman. Now she’s confident. Now
she has a voice and a future.”
Both her
business and the initiative seem to be doing very well; while she’s
changing the lives of young women, her auto garage is home to a
pool of unique clients. “Our clients keep coming back, they prefer
us because we are determined to be better than a lot of mechanics
who take their jobs for granted,” she says. This strong and
ambitious woman occasionally visits her satellite branches of LMI
which is fast expanding across Nigeria with her latest branch in
the northern city of Kano. Aljazeera reports that so far, the
response from Muslim women has been unprecedented.
