Women’s Inclusion Could Raise Nigeria’s Output By 23% – Presidency

The Presidency has said greater economic participation by women could raise Nigeria’s national output by as much as 23 per cent, stressing that women’s economic inclusion is critical to achieving the country’s ambition of building a $1 trillion economy.

The Technical Adviser to the President on Economic and Financial Inclusion, Dr Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro, stated this on Wednesday at the Second National Gender Inclusion Conference, #ProjectShesIncluded, held at the Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Zauro said credible estimates indicated that Nigeria’s national output could be materially higher if there was greater equality in women’s participation in the economy.

“When productive capital cannot reach productive citizens, talent is not matched to opportunity, and the whole economy operates below potential,” he said.

“Credible estimates suggest national output could be materially higher by as much as 23 percent, with greater equality in women’s participation. That is why the Aso Accord treats inclusion as an economic infrastructure: a one-trillion-dollar economy must be one that works for women.”

He said the challenge was no longer simply giving women access to financial services but ensuring that such access translated into productive finance, enterprise growth, income, assets and resilience.

“A woman may hold an account and still lack affordable credit; receive a loan and lack a market; own a business and lack the records or collateral to scale it,” he said.

According to him, the government’s objective is to move women along a continuum “from access to usage; from usage to productive finance; from finance to enterprise growth; and from growth to income, assets and resilience.Access is the beginning of inclusion; it is not its destination,” he said.

Zauro said overall financial inclusion among Nigerian adults stood at 74 per cent, according to EFInA’s 2023 survey, but a nine-point gender gap remained in overall inclusion and an 11-point gap in formal access.

He said only 47 per cent of women were served through formal financial access compared with 58 per cent of men, while women remained over-represented among the roughly one in four adults still excluded.

The Presidential adviser said the Federal Government was building four major platforms to move gender inclusion from policy declarations to measurable economic outcomes.

He identified the platforms as digital trust infrastructure, data for accountability, blended finance and the National Income Activation Initiative.

According to him, digital trust infrastructure would strengthen reliable identity, interoperable payments, responsible data and consumer protection, helping women in the informal economy become more visible and verifiable to formal financial institutions.

He explained that greater visibility of women’s economic activity could help financial institutions assess risk and extend credit.

The second platform, he said, would involve tracking gender-disaggregated access, usage and quality across states and sectors, with interventions assessed based on who was reached, what changed, the cost and whether the intervention could be scaled.

On blended finance, Zauro said public and concessional capital should be used strategically to unlock larger pools of private financing for women-led enterprises.

He said the government would focus on actual outcomes, including capital disbursed, enterprises financed, loans repaid, jobs created and the amount of private capital mobilised by every public naira.

He also identified the National Income Activation Initiative, being delivered with the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, as another key platform.

The initiative, he said, combines skills, markets, digital tools, finance and business support across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones.

“Skills without markets yield certificates without livelihoods, and credit without capability yields debt rather than growth,” he said.

Zauro also highlighted the Women in Energy Partnership with the World Bank, saying women must be positioned as entrepreneurs, engineers, investors and leaders in the energy transition, as well as in the digital economy, agriculture, manufacturing and creative industries.

He called for rigorous monitoring and evaluation of inclusion programmes, saying government must scale what delivers, redesign what underperforms and discontinue what does not.

Also speaking at the conference, the Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Hajiya Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, said a substantial part of Nigeria’s prospective $1 trillion economy was already being produced by women whose economic activities remained largely unbanked, uncounted and unfinanced.

She said the challenge was not a lack of ambition but the design of systems capable of reaching women at the last mile.

“The trillion is not somewhere else. A substantial part of it is already being produced by women our systems have simply not yet been designed to see,” she said.

The minister said her ministry’s Renewed Hope Social Impact Interventions currently operate across all 774 Local Government Areas, supported by counterpart ministries in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

She also highlighted the Nigeria for Women Programme Scale-Up, implemented with the World Bank, which organises women into Women Affinity Groups that save together, lend to one another and grow their enterprises.

According to her, the first phase mobilised more than 560,000 women into over 26,000 groups, with the women saving more than ₦4.9 billion of their own resources and accessing about ₦15.6 billion in livelihood grants.

She said the scale-up would extend the architecture to 4.5 million women through 300,000 groups nationwide.

In Katsina State alone, she said more than 57,000 women across three Local Government Areas had saved ₦349 million through their weekly contributions, while the state government had resolved to extend the programme to all 34 Local Government Areas.

Sulaiman-Ibrahim said the savings records, repayment histories and group guarantee structures represented a potential credit history for women who had traditionally been considered difficult to finance.

She urged financial institutions to design products around the realities of Nigerian women, including alternative-data credit scoring, guarantee-backed lending that recognises group liability and low-cost interoperable payments.

The minister cited an International Finance Corporation (IFC), estimate that closing Nigeria’s gender financing gap could unlock about $14.8 billion annually.

She described the figure as a commercial opportunity rather than merely a social return.

Sulaiman-Ibrahim also highlighted the Renewed Hope Women Agro-Value Expansion Programme, known as WAVE, through which women are being moved from subsistence farming into structured agribusiness.

She said the ministry had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bank of Agriculture to unlock concessional financing below 10 per cent for women farmers.

She further cited the Women in Gas initiative, known as WINGS, which is enabling women to enter the liquefied petroleum gas value chain through refill and enterprise hubs on a lease-to-own basis.

Another initiative, Women on Wheels, she said, enables women to operate mobile enterprises on a zero-deposit model that culminates in full title transfer.

According to the Minister, the common principle across the programmes is the transfer of productive assets rather than the distribution of consumables.

She also stressed the importance of gender-disaggregated data, saying policies could not be properly designed where women were not adequately counted.

Sulaiman-Ibrahim further argued that safety and care must be treated as part of women’s economic inclusion.

She described gender-based violence as not only a protection failure but also an economic one, while unpaid care work, which she said was carried overwhelmingly by women, constituted a major barrier to women’s participation in the formal economy.

“A crèche at a market is not a welfare gesture; it is a productivity intervention,” she said.

The minister said the federal government’s task was now to connect existing programmes, institutions, data and delivery systems and scale interventions that had demonstrated results.

She urged stakeholders to move from concern to coordination and from coordination to concrete economic outcomes for Nigerian women.