Reading Ifa is not a skill anyone may simply acquire. It rests on initiation, specifically to Orunmila, the orisha associated with the oracle, and the initiated diviner is titled babalawo, with iyanifa used for women where women are initiated. The training that follows initiation runs for years.
Whether and where women may be initiated as diviners is itself an active question, answered differently by different lineages and different national communities, and argued about in the open. The atlas notes the disagreement without adjudicating it, because it is a matter for the tradition and not for a reference work, and because the situation on the ground varies by place rather than resolving into a single rule.
What is not in dispute is that authority to divine is conferred rather than assumed, and that this is the ordinary condition of the practice rather than a restriction imposed on it from outside. UNESCO's 2005 recognition of the Ifa divination system described it as a body of texts and procedures interpreted by a trained diviner, rather than as a message received by anyone who holds the instruments.
Obara Meji, seventh of the sixteen principal figures, heads material within that conferred corpus. The atlas describes the institution and the scholarship. The verses, the readings and the prescriptions belong to initiated practitioners and are not set out here.