October 11, (THEWILL) – SAM DIALA argues that Nigerian women are not fame-seekers; they need opportunities to convert their enormous potential into economic and political power
Women are not asking Nigeria for charity. They are asking for the opportunity, capital, education, security and institutional space to convert their enormous contribution into economic and political power.
For generations, Nigerian women have carried an extraordinary share of the country’s economic burden without receiving a commensurate share of its economic power.
They trade in crowded markets before sunrise. They cultivate farms, process food, run small shops, provide domestic services, raise children, support families, build enterprises and increasingly enter professions once considered exclusively male. Yet, when the serious business of allocating capital, owning assets, controlling companies, making laws and determining national priorities begins, women frequently disappear from the room.
The development paradox
This is the central paradox of Nigeria’s development story: the country depends heavily on women’s labour while systematically leaving too much of women’s potential underdeveloped. The consequences are not merely about gender equality. They are economic.
The World Bank estimates that women own about 40 percent of micro, small and medium enterprises in Nigeria. Yet 52 per cent of women-led firms identify access to finance as a major constraint to growth, compared with 30 per cent of male-led firms. Even more revealing, 56 percent of female entrepreneurs reported rejection of their most recent loan applications, against 17 percent of male entrepreneurs.
These numbers expose a national waste. Nigeria does not have a shortage of women with enterprise. It has a shortage of systems capable of turning women’s enterprise into scale. The difference matters. A woman selling food by the roadside is an entrepreneur. A woman who owns a food-processing company employing 100 people is also an entrepreneur. But the policy environment that enables the second woman to emerge from the first is where genuine empowerment begins.
Women empowerment must therefore move beyond ceremonies, grants, commemorative speeches and photographs. It must become an economic strategy.
Woman Behind the Statistics
The Nigerian woman is often described as vulnerable. That description is incomplete. She is also a producer, employer, investor, farmer, consumer, taxpayer, caregiver and economic shock absorber.
When inflation rises, she absorbs part of the shock by stretching household income. When food prices increase, she changes household consumption. When a husband loses his job, she often expands her informal activity. When a child leaves school, she searches for alternatives. When a business collapses, she starts again.
But resilience should not become an excuse for policy neglect. A society should not celebrate women’s ability to survive conditions that public policy has failed to correct. This distinction is crucial. Empowerment is not making women better at coping with deprivation. It is removing the barriers that produce deprivation in the first place.
UN Women defines economic empowerment in terms of women’s equal rights and access to, ownership and control of resources, assets, income and time. That definition takes the conversation beyond the familiar language of empowerment.
A woman who receives a N50,000 grant but cannot obtain a larger loan to expand her business has received assistance, but not necessarily economic power. A girl who is enrolled in school but forced to leave because of early marriage has received access to education, but not yet the full benefits of empowerment.
A female professional who reaches middle management but is excluded from strategic decision-making may have a job, but not necessarily institutional power. And a woman who works from morning until night without controlling income or owning productive assets may be economically active without being economically empowered.
The difference between participation and power is at the heart of Nigeria’s gender challenge.
The finance wall
Perhaps nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in access to capital. Women constitute a substantial portion of Nigeria’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, yet finance remains one of the biggest obstacles to their growth.
World Bank evidence shows that only about 11 per cent of the MSME loan portfolios examined in one study went to women-led businesses, despite strong demand for formal finance among women entrepreneurs.
The problem is partly structural. Traditional lending often demands collateral. But ownership of land, buildings and other formal assets is frequently constrained by inheritance practices, social norms and household ownership patterns.
The result is a vicious cycle.
No collateral means no substantial loan.
No substantial loan means no scale.
No scale means lower revenues.
Lower revenues mean weaker borrowing capacity.
And weaker borrowing capacity reinforces dependence on informal finance.
This is why innovative lending deserves much more attention.
The World Bank has documented the use of cash-flow-based lending in Nigeria, in which lenders use business transaction data rather than relying exclusively on physical collateral to assess creditworthiness. Evidence from the initiative indicates that this approach can increase the number and size of loans available to women entrepreneurs.
Nigeria should take this further. The country’s rapidly expanding digital-payment infrastructure creates an opportunity to build credit histories around actual economic activity. A woman who receives hundreds of payments into a digital account every month, purchases inventory regularly and maintains a consistent transaction history should not be treated as financially invisible simply because she does not own a building. Her cash flow is an asset. Her transaction history is evidence. Her business activity is collateral of another kind.
Banks, fintechs, development-finance institutions and regulators should therefore deepen data-driven lending models that can bring credible women-owned businesses into formal credit markets.
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Invisible Economy of Unpaid Work
There is another barrier that conventional economic statistics often struggle to capture: unpaid care.
Millions of Nigerian women cook, clean, fetch water, care for children, look after elderly relatives and support households without receiving wages. The work is real. The economic value is real. But because it is unpaid, it is frequently treated as though it has no economic value.
Nigeria’s own gender policy documentation has highlighted the limited recognition given to women’s unpaid domestic and care work and the shortage of support systems such as childcare and workplace arrangements that allow women to combine family responsibilities with economic activity.
This is more than a social issue. It is a productivity issue. A woman who spends several hours every day on unpaid care has fewer hours available for paid employment, entrepreneurship, education, networking and professional advancement.
UN Women notes that women in West and Central Africa spend substantially more time than men on unpaid care work, and argues that addressing unequal care responsibilities can unlock significant economic potential.
For Nigeria, the implication is straightforward. Childcare is economic infrastructure. Water supply is economic infrastructure. Reliable electricity is economic infrastructure. Public transport is economic infrastructure. Safe neighbourhoods are economic infrastructure.
When government reduces the amount of time women spend performing unpaid survival tasks, it releases time for productive economic activity. That is empowerment through infrastructure.
Education: The First Battlefield
The empowerment of women does not begin with adulthood. It begins with the girl child. A girl denied education today becomes a woman with fewer choices tomorrow. A girl who completes secondary school is more likely to have a wider range of economic possibilities. A girl who acquires digital and technical skills enters a labour market with more options. A girl who remains in school is better positioned to postpone marriage and make more informed decisions about her future. This is why Nigeria’s education crisis has a gender dimension that cannot be ignored.
Child marriage remains a major barrier. UNICEF reported in 2024 that about four in 10 Nigerian girls were married before age 18, while prevalence is particularly severe among poorer, rural and less-educated girls. The economic implications are profound.
Every girl removed prematurely from school represents more than an educational loss. It is a loss of future earnings A loss of entrepreneurship. A loss of skilled labour. A loss of innovation. A loss of leadership. And ultimately, a loss of national productivity.
Programmes such as the World Bank-supported AGILE initiative demonstrate that targeted incentives can help girls return to school. But interventions must go beyond enrolment. Nigeria needs sustained investment in girls’ education, especially in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, digital skills, agriculture, financial literacy and vocational training.
The country cannot build a modern economy while millions of potential female innovators are locked out of the skills pipeline. Where are the women in the boardrooms? The exclusion becomes even more visible when power is measured politically.
According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, women currently account for only about 4.2 per cent of Nigeria’s House of Representatives and 3.7 per cent of the Senate. These figures are not simply about parliamentary seats. They are about who participates directly in making decisions on budgets, taxation, education, healthcare, security, agriculture, employment and economic policy.
Representation does not automatically guarantee better policy outcomes. But the extremely low representation of women means that Nigerian women remain significantly underrepresented in one of the country’s most important decision-making institutions.
The same principle applies in business. If women are heavily represented among micro-business owners but thinly represented among large corporate owners, chief executives, boards and major investors, then the economic ladder is breaking somewhere between entrepreneurship and scale. That is where policy must concentrate.
According to Prof. Agnes Ogbuka, a development economist,e mpowerment should not end when a woman starts a business.
“Empowerment should ask these critical questions: Can she access procurement? Can she obtain growth capital? Can she own property? Can she enter supply chains? Can she export? Can she employ workers? Can she access technology? Can she sit on a corporate board? Can she influence policy? Can she inherit assets? Can she pass wealth to the next generation? Those questions reveal whether empowerment is real.”
From Beneficiaries to Economic Actors
Ogbuka further explained that Nigeria’s approach to women empowerment has often been built around beneficiaries. These include women receive grants. Women receive sewing machines. Women receive food packages. Women receive training. Women receive microcredit. These interventions can be useful, particularly for vulnerable households.
“But the larger ambition must be different. Women must be treated as economic actors, not permanent beneficiaries.”
One important example is the Nigeria for Women Project, which supported more than 458,000 women through 22,094 Women Affinity Groups between 2018 and 2024. The groups mobilised savings, facilitated access to credit and provided platforms for skills, mentoring and financial services. The World Bank reports that the project reached more than one million people directly and indirectly.
The lesson is important: empowerment becomes more sustainable when women are organised, connected to finance and equipped with mechanisms through which they can collectively build economic resilience.
Ogbuka insists that this model should be expanded—but with a stronger emphasis on graduation. According to her, the objective should be to move women:
from survival to stability;
from stability to productivity;
from productivity to scale;
from scale to ownership; and from ownership to influence.
She described this as the ladder of economic empowerment.
The Technology Opportunity
Nigeria’s digital transformation offers another opportunity.
A Lagos-based agricultural processing entrepreneur, Josephine Odulana, said digital payments can give women transaction histories. According to her, Digital marketplaces can connect rural producers with urban consumers as online education can expand access to skills.
“Digital banking can reduce geographic barriers. Technology can connect women entrepreneurs to markets beyond their immediate communities. But technology is not automatically inclusive. Women who lack smartphones, digital literacy, affordable internet access or reliable electricity can be excluded from the very digital economy intended to empower them.
“The answer is therefore not merely to digitise. It is to digitise inclusively,” she said in a note to THEWILL.
She further explained that banks and fintechs should design products around the realities of women-owned businesses. Government should expand digital infrastructure. Training should accompany financial products. And programmes should deliberately reach rural women rather than assuming that digital access automatically spreads to everyone.
Security is also Empowerment
Economy experts insists that no empowerment strategy can succeed in an environment where women cannot live, work and travel safely. They maintain that gender-based violence, sexual harassment and insecurity impose economic costs.
For instance, a woman who avoids certain markets because of insecurity loses customers. A girl who stops attending school because of threats loses educational opportunities. A professional who leaves a workplace because of harassment loses income and career progression. A farmer unable to reach her farm because of insecurity loses productive assets.
Therefore, women’s security must be treated as economic policy. The goal should be a country where women can own businesses, travel to work, participate in politics, inherit property, access finance and pursue education without their gender becoming an economic liability.
What Genuine Empowerment Should Look Like
Nigeria does not need another catalogue of slogans. It needs measurable outcomes. Government should track how many women-owned businesses receive credit, not simply how much money is announced for women. It should measure how many girls complete secondary education, not simply how many are enrolled.
Banks should disclose the proportion of their MSME lending going to women-owned businesses. Procurement agencies should measure women’s participation in public supply chains. Corporate boards should disclose gender composition.
Government should collect better sex-disaggregated data on ownership, employment, credit, income and entrepreneurship. And budgets should be subjected to gender-responsive analysis so that spending can be evaluated by its actual effects on women and men.
The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law assessment has also highlighted gaps in regular sex-disaggregated data and in mechanisms supporting female entrepreneurs and women’s asset ownership.
What gets measured gets attention. What gets funded gets implemented. What gets monitored has a greater chance of surviving political cycles.
There is a tendency to discuss women empowerment as though Nigeria is doing women a favour. The reverse is closer to the economic truth.
Nestle Nigeria’s Example
Nestlé Nigeria in July 2025 announced the expansion of its flagship initiative, Nestlé Empowering Rural Women in Nigeria, to Agbara, Ogun State. Aimed at strengthening small businesses and enhancing livelihoods within rural communities, this program had welcomed 49 new female retailers.
Then in its fifth year, the Nestlé Empowering Rural Women in Nigeria project had empowered over 382 women across the country, enabling them to expand their businesses by as much as threefold. Through tailored business training, product grants, and mentorship, the initiative supports women in building more profitable retail ventures, reinforcing Nestlé’s commitment to inclusive growth at the community level. With the addition of the 49 new participants from Agbara, the project had reached a total of 431 women.
At the opening ceremony in Agbara, Victoria Uwadoka, Corporate Communications, Public Affairs, and Sustainability Lead at Nestlé Nigeria, stated, “Nestlé Empowering Rural Women in Nigeria is about creating genuine opportunities for women. Supporting rural women to scale their retail operations by up to 300% within just three months is not only beneficial for business but also essential for fostering a more inclusive economy, stronger families, and resilient communities.”
She further emphasized, “Opening new doors for hardworking women determined to build better futures for themselves and their families in Agbara holds significant meaning for us, as this community has been home to Nestlé Nigeria for over four decades. We have witnessed the transformative impact of structured training, mentorship, and business grants on the 382 women who have already benefited from this initiative, and we are confident that we will see more success stories emerge from Agbara. Through this initiative, we are not only supporting individual entrepreneurs; we are investing in ripple effects that will benefit the entire community.”
Boladale Odunlami, Commercial Manager at Nestlé Nigeria, elaborated on the initiative’s purpose: “At Nestlé, we are intentional about creating growth opportunities across every segment of our value chain. The Empowering Rural Women in Nigeria initiative was launched in 2021 to support women retailers in underserved communities, recognizing their critical role in driving local economies. Since its inception, over 380 women have benefited from the program, with more than 85% reporting sustained business expansion.
“With product grants valued at up to 300% of their existing business size, participants have improved their turnover, increased revenue, and strengthened their community presence. This edition is particularly special, as the participants were nominated by their own communities and will each receive product grants worth N200,000. We are excited to welcome the Agbara cohort and are confident that, with the support we provide, they will continue this legacy of progress and success.”
Beneficiaries received training in essential areas such as entrepreneurship, bookkeeping, merchandising, and customer service skills which are vital for running successful retail operations. Each participant was also assigned a personal mentor for three months and received product grants to help them scale sustainably.
Sam Diala is a Bloomberg Certified Financial Journalist with over a decade of experience in reporting Business and Economy. He is Business Editor at THEWILL Newspaper, and believes that work, not wishes, creates wealth.
