---
id: "virtual-communities:case/female-in"
type: "GovLab case study"
title: "Female IN (FIN)"
url: "https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/case/female-in"
date: "2021-02-19"
summary: "1.7 million women are leading with kindness"
source: "The GovLab (virtual-communities.thegovlab.org)"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)"
---

# Female IN (FIN)

**1.7 million women are leading with kindness**

- Founding year: 2015
- Group size: 1,743,400,146 members (group); 180,808 follows and 169,693 likes (page)
- Location: Global
- Part of: [The Power of Virtual Communities](https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/)

## Introduction

In autumn of 2015, Chinwe (a pseudonym), a Nigerian woman living in London, logged into Facebook and made a troubling post. Chinwe said that, while driving on the highway earlier, she had considered driving off the road and into the sea to take her own life. Members of Female in Nigeria - at the time a small, private Facebook group that was only three weeks old - saw that Chinwe needed help. Online, there was an immediate outpouring of support; members sent messages reminding Chinwe of what she had to live for. They convinced Chinwe to seek professional help, and even helped to babysit her children while she spoke with a therapist.

Lola Omolola, a 44-year old mother of two based in Chicago, founded the Female in Nigeria Facebook group in 2015. Omolola grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to the United States when she was 24 years old. She created Female IN (as the group is known today) to serve as a safe space for women in the Nigerian diaspora to discuss and seek support for challenging problems, ranging from relationship struggles to health issues, grief and loss. In the years since, Female IN has grown to become a community with more than 1.7 million members.

## How it All Started

In April 2014, the terrorist group Boko Haram [abducted 276 girls](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32299943) from their school in Chibok, a town in northeastern Nigeria. As #bringbackourgirls took Twitter [by storm](https://www.dw.com/en/the-tweet-that-launched-bringbackourgirls/a-17630568), news of the kidnapping spread far beyond Nigeria, eventually reaching journalist Lola Omolola at her home in Chicago.

Watching the events unfold, Omolola noticed that, while the kidnapping recieved a lot of media coverage, the world’s attention focused on the larger story about terrorism rather than the girls themselves. She knew that there were other women out there who must have felt the same way, but didn’t know how to reach them. "I just knew I wanted to find them at the very least, so that I wouldn't be by myself, because I felt really lonely," she said in an [interview](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/06/04/613460142/one-womans-facebook-success-story-a-support-group-for-1-7-million) with National Public Radio (NPR).

So in 2015, Omolola started a Facebook group called Female in Nigeria (FIN). The group was “secret,” meaning that membership was by invitation only, and grew primarily by former members inviting other women to join. Women immediately began to recount stories of sexual assault, domestic violence, and other intimate experiences. “There were women who had been abused for 40 years and hadn't told anyone,” Omolola [told the BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40261913).

While originally focused on women in and from Nigeria, the group’s message has caught on around the world. Omolola changed the name to “Female IN” in 2017 to reflect that the group now has members in [more than 100 countries](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/female-in-fin_covid-and-digitalization-activity-6692535538014027776-IADS).

## Leadership

![Fin Omolola Headshot](https://thegovlab-files.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thegovlab-directus9/uploads/78f7e52e-d819-407c-8945-a692a7a9b6cd.jpg)

*Figure 1: Lola Omolola, a former journalist based in Chicago, founded Female IN (FIN) in 2015. Photo courtesy of Lola Omolola.*

A group of eight volunteer moderators manages the group’s day to day activities. Moderators have to approve each post to the group as well as approve new members. While in the past the group had up to 30 moderators, Omolola says that Facebook’s improved moderation tools have reduced the need for human moderators.

Omolola selects passionate members of the community to participate in a 6 - 8 week training program. While the skills she looks for include self-awareness, written and verbal communication, negotiation skills, project management, and event planning, the training program teaches empathy above all else. “I come from a society where we often reward the loudest and embrace the most abrasive people in our midst. I knew that would be existentially destructive for building any kind of support group,” Omolola told us. “To lead, empathy is huge.”

The rules outlaw anonymous users, spam and advertising, religious advice, unkind and judgmental behavior, and unsolicited advice in posts and comments. While the group aims to prevent rule-breaking before it happens, inevitably some rules will be broken. Depending on how egregious the offence was, members who are removed from the group may be allowed to rejoin going through a “redemption loop,” where moderators review the offense, remind the member of the group’s rules and purpose, and then readmit them. Omolola says that the moderators have never had to remove the same person from the group twice. Since a sense of safety is crucial for women to feel comfortable sharing their stories, moderators permanently ban anyone who shares members’ posts outside the group.

## Participation

New members of FIN can only be added by a current member. To grow the group, Omolola began sending out invitations to women within her network. From there, the group grew organically as “Finsters” (as members are known) invited other women in their lives to join the community.

Omolola says that women participate because the community provides them a sense of belonging and safety that society at large is unable to match, especially Nigerian society. Being an online-first community has allowed the group to span geographical boundaries that otherwise would keep members from ever meeting.

FIN does not allow anonymous posts. Omolola feels that, in contrast to typical online groups where anonymity acts as a barrier to intimacy, this practice has helped members build relationships quicker than through a traditional friendship. Members open up more quickly online, and learn intimate aspects of each other’s lives that would have taken years to learn in offline relationships.

## Action

Female IN coordinates its actions through both online and offline activities.

Online, FIN functions as a support group where women post their experiences on the private Facebook group and others leave comments to offer their support. Members post resources for coping with abuse and supporting survivors, publicize news of abusers who have been convicted of crimes, and share personal stories about surviving abuse.

Omolola also organizes live streamed events with featured guests who talk about topics ranging from motherhood to community development in Africa to early childhood education. For instance, in March 2020 she held a series of conversations about COVID-19 education and prevention with medical professionals, journalists, and other speakers to answer questions about the pandemic from members of the community. In April, Omolola interviewed group member Yemi Adenuga about her work as the [first Black woman](https://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/yemi-adenuga-elected-navan-meath) to be elected to a county council in Ireland.

The group has organized meetups in more than 80 cities across four continents, including cities like Lagos, Johannesburg, London, Italy and New York. The events enhance the bonds that members create as they share their stories. People meet for the first time offline, then go online to learn more about one another.

## Outcome and Impact

One of FIN’s primary impacts is in creating an alternative to cultures that silence and devalue the experiences of women. Ultimately, however, the goal is not simply to create a new kind of culture and community online but to change cultural attitudes in the real life countries their members inhabit. While Omolola acknowledges that this goal cannot be achieved entirely within one lifetime, she says the group appears to play an active and impactful role in the lives of many of its members. As University of Ibadan researchers Adebukola Dagunduro and Adebimpe Adenugba [write in a 2020 article](https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/journals/culture/4/1/article-p23.xml), “FIN has gained global recognition and is one of the few activist groups in Nigeria that has succeeded in achieving its goals of lending a voice to women in crises.”

While it is difficult to quantify the impact of the group on society at large, Omolola says that the community has helped many members to feel more supported and empowered. According to survey findings shared by FIN,1 the vast majority of group members surveyed report that they have become more tolerant since they joined the community, that their vision of the role of women in society has evolved, and that FIN is one of the first actors they would connect with during a crisis situation.[1] “I grew up in a society where we couldn't even express ourselves freely to family members,” Omolola told us. When members join the community, “they are suddenly in a space where people actually care what they have to say. They’ve never felt freer in their lives.”

## Challenges

Female IN faced significant challenges in its early days.

At the beginning, the community grew quickly, much faster than Omolola anticipated for a secret group. “When it started, I had no expectations of what would happen when we opened the floodgates,” she says. Managing this growth was more work than Omolola, who is not paid to run the group, expected. Members constantly pushed the boundaries of what behaviors were and were not acceptable. They needed to learn how to be kind and compassionate, traits that are not always common in online communication.

Critics have identified the group’s growth as an existential challenge. In a 2018 [profile](http://www.agi.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/429/feminist_africa_journals/archive/22/fa22_profiles_1.pdf) published by the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town, former member Ayodele Olofintuade writes that, as FIN has grown, “it has become nearly impossible to enforce rules and there is no longer a sense of ownership and sisterhood.” Olofintuade goes on to argue that the group’s size has made it impossible for the group’s leaders to effectively moderate the group, leading to an increase in the number of posts that violate its rules (e.g. about religiosity).

To be sure, the fair and consistent enforcement of actions against those who break the group’s rules is crucial to mitigate the challenges that Olofintuade writes about. For instance, Omolola sees banning members who share posts outside the group as crucial: “Steps like that are what we take to make sure our community members feel safe. They see us holding people accountable. They see us being consistent, and that’s making a difference,” she says.

One challenging moment came on October 21, 2020, when a dozen people protesting police brutality, corruption, and inequality as part of the [#EndSARS](https://www.vox.com/21529010/endsars-nigeria-protests-police-explained) movement were [murdered by Nigerian security forces](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/world/africa/nigeria-shooting-protesters-SARS-Lekki.html) in Lagos. On the same day, Omolola temporarily archived FIN (meaning that members could read past posts but could not make new posts or comments) as a “silent strike” against the violence in Nigeria. She un-archived the group four days later.

When asked about running FIN on a private platform, Omolola says she has no concerns about operating on Facebook for two reasons. First, the FIN group gives women the freedom to express themselves and exist in a way that Omolola says is otherwise impossible for many members. “They finally have a space that has never existed for them, either in-person or online, and our community serves that purpose,” Omolola says. Second, Omolola feels that building the FIN community would have been near impossible if not for the platform, which Facebook provides for free. “My focus is on what this tool, which was designed for community building, allows us to achieve in such a short period of time,” Omolola says. While she acknowledges that privacy could potentially be an issue, Omolola says members of the community have never raised privacy concerns about Facebook.

## Future Prospects

The group’s current focus is on expanding the number of people who are able to access support through the community, which they accomplish through several approaches. The group is planning to create a “FIN for Girls” project where younger women can share their stories anonymously. Likewise, since many women in rural areas lack access to the internet, FIN is exploring ways to reach those women and use an appropriate medium to meet them at their place of comfort.

FIN is also expanding to offer more services to community members. It is planning to create a resource center to connect women with support services. For example, a woman in need of therapy could be connected with a psychologist in her area, while a woman going through a custody battle could be connected with legal services. Through an online portal, women in need would be able to access a “social good” database where they could be connected with others who provide these services.

## Lessons learned

- **Offer an alternative value system to the dominant culture** - Because Nigerian culture generally relegates women to second class status, creating a space run by women for women offers an appealing counter-cultural community that attracts significant participation from those tired of the dominant culture.
- **Be exclusive to be inclusive** - The strict and equitable enforcement of FIN’s rules, both for membership and members’ behavior, is crucial to the group’s success. Women need to feel safe in order to share stories about discrimination, assault, and other very private topics. While this means excluding certain groups, including men, anonymous users, and non-supportive women, this exclusion is necessary to foster the sense of inclusivity that the community thrives upon.
- **Lead by example -** Many group members were initially uncomfortable with the group’s strict rules. They felt that their freedom of speech was being violated by not being able to question or judge other women’s stories. As founder, Omolola set the tone early on, which has helped to attract more members who are aligned with the group’s values.
- **Leverage your existing skills -** Running a community of 1.7 million people takes significant skills in project management as well as in communication. Omolola was able to leverage her background in journalism to figure out ways to communicate with the community through trial and error. “People should take a class before starting a community, because that would have saved me a lot of early stress,” she said.

## End notes

1. Source: Research conducted by management consultancy Archipel&Co.on behalf of Female IN, survey of 2862 group members, June 2019