When Aissa Doumara was twelve years old, her mother died and she was sent to live with an aunt. Her father was coming for dinner one night, and she prepared a special sauce for him. Asked by the aunt if he was pleased that his daughter could cook so well, Aissa's father replied,

"Her husband is the one who will be pleased. " More than twenty years later, Aissa recalls that moment with perfect clarity. "It sent chills down my spine," she says. For Aissa, her father's comment was a stinging reminder that in northern Cameroon, a girl's life was not her own. "In this region," she reflects, "if you're born female, you realize very quickly that your life is not going to be as good or as easy as your brothers' lives, as boys' lives. You know because it's always being repeated to you in one way or another--you're always being reminded that you don't really belong to your family. If you quarrel with your little brothers, your family says, 'Yes, but you'll be gone one day.'"

Aissa was a strong student, consistently among the first in her class. Her father, however, had other plans for her. She had her first suitor at the age of eleven, and by the time she turned fifteen, her father had promised her to one of his own contemporaries--a man 21 years her senior.

By the following year, Aissa was married to this man and sent to live with his extended family, whom she had never met. "I was so sad, I cried for months," she recalls. "I didn't want to do my hair, I didn't want to talk to anyone, I just wanted to go home. But it wasn't my home any more--I belonged to another family now. All of my unmarried classmates went back to school, but I just stayed in the house and cried. I couldn't even eat." Within another year, Aissa became pregnant, the first of three pregnancies.

This story is typical of many young women who grow up in the far north of Cameroon, but Aissa was relatively lucky: One of her husband's cousins urged her to resume her studies and her husband permitted her to do so. Overcoming the depression and inertia brought on by her marriage, she strapped her infant daughters on her back and attended classes by day, then returned to her domestic responsibilities in the evening. Upon completing secondary school, Aissa received two scholarship offers, one to study in the Cameroonian capital of Yaounde, 500 miles away, and one to study at a university in Germany. At her husband's urging, Aissa declined both offers. Instead, she remained in Maroua (1) and enrolled in a local professional course.

Aissa's life changed in 1996. At a Rotary Club dinner she attended with her husband, she met a woman named Sike Bille. Sike, who comes from southern Cameroon, had recently moved to Maroua for a community development job with the Ministry of Water, Mines, and Energy. A...