United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed Calls for Global Action at the UNESCO REF - POWA Launch of the 12 Million Young Women in Agriculture Mobilisation Campaign

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Prof. Hafsat Ganduje

Wife to the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje • Advocate for Women’s Empowerment

Speaking as a long-standing advocate for women’s empowerment at the UNESCO REF & POWA national flag-off of the 12 Million Young Women in Agriculture Mobilisation Campaign, Prof. Hafsat Ganduje underscored the grassroots importance of the campaign, framing it not merely as an agricultural programme but as a covenant of dignity, opportunity, and security for families across the Federation.

“The mobilisation of 12 million young women into agriculture is not just about food production, it is about dignity, opportunity, and security for families across Nigeria. When women are empowered with knowledge and resources, entire communities rise out of poverty.

This campaign is a clarion call for every state, every local government, and every household to support women as the backbone of our nation’s food system.”

Empowerment That Begins in the Household

Prof. Ganduje’s intervention placed the household at the centre of the national food-security conversation. Her argument is that when a young woman gains the skills, inputs, and market access to run a productive agricultural enterprise, the benefits radiate outward, to her children’s nutrition and education, to the resilience of her community, and ultimately to the stability of the nation. Empowerment, in this framing, is not charity extended to women; it is strategic investment in the most efficient multiplier of household and community wellbeing.

She drew a direct line between economic opportunity for women and broader social outcomes, noting that families anchored by financially secure women are more likely to keep children in school, invest in health, and withstand economic shocks. In this sense, the UNESCO REF Young Women in Agriculture programme, with its structured training in hydroponics and agro-kenaf enterprise, guaranteed income cycles, and value-chain linkages, functions as both an agricultural intervention and a social-stability instrument.

A Call to Every State, LGA, and Household

The heart of Prof. Ganduje’s address was a national call to shared responsibility. The scale of the ambition, 12 million young women mobilised across all 774 Local Government Areas, cannot, she argued, be delivered by any single institution. It requires state governments to integrate the programme into their agricultural and women-affairs strategies, local governments to identify and convene participants at the community level, and households to give their daughters, wives, and sisters the encouragement and space to participate.

Her remarks resonated with the broader chorus of national and global leaders at the flag-off, from the UN Deputy Secretary-General’s charge that women’s empowerment is strategy rather than charity, to the Inspector-General of Police’s framing of food security as national security. Prof. Ganduje’s contribution grounded those high-level commitments in the everyday reality of the Nigerian home, reminding the gathering that national transformation is ultimately the sum of millions of empowered households.

Strategic Alignment

The advocacy directly supports SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), and SDG 5 (Gender Equality), reinforcing the UNESCO REF SIP-Alpha framework’s emphasis on women-led, community-anchored development as the engine of Nigeria’s food sovereignty and the 2030 Agenda.

The National Advocate for the UNESCO REF Young Women in Agriculture, Dr. (Mrs.) Elizabeth Egbetokun, conducted a working visit to His Excellency Senator Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed, Governor of Bauchi State, to formalise and accelerate collaboration for the strategic mobilisation, capacity building and economic empowerment of young women in agriculture across the state. The engagement advances shared commitments to gender equality, sustainable agriculture and inclusive rural development, in line with national priorities and global development frameworks.

Background and Purpose

The visit reaffirmed the mutual objective of localising international best practice through state-level partnerships. The UNESCO REF SIP-Alpha Young Women in Agriculture Programme seeks to equip young women with technical skills, entrepreneurial capacity, access to innovation and market linkages, and governance mechanisms that ensure transparency and accountability. The meeting focused on operationalising these objectives within Bauchi State through coordinated planning, resource mobilisation and institutional support.

Key Outcomes

Scaling and Replication. A pilot implementation timeline was agreed to demonstrate impact and inform scale-up across additional local government areas.

“We are committed to forging durable partnerships that translate global commitments into tangible opportunities for young women. By aligning national advocacy with state leadership, we will expand access to skills, finance and markets so that women can lead resilient, productive agricultural enterprises.”

“Bauchi State welcomes this strategic collaboration. Our administration will prioritise policies and resources that empower women, strengthen food systems and promote inclusive economic growth. Together we will ensure that young women are central to the state’s agricultural transformation.”

Strategic Alignment

This partnership supports Nigeria’s national development objectives and contributes directly to the Sustainable Development Goals, notably SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). The initiative emphasises climate resilience, innovation, and private-public collaboration as pillars for sustainable impact.

Next Steps

• Finalise a joint implementation plan and pilot sites within Bauchi State.
• Convene a multi-stakeholder steering committee including government agencies, civil society, private sector partners and youth representatives.
• Launch an initial training and mobilisation phase, accompanied by a transparent monitoring framework and public reporting schedule.

Guinness World Record holder for the longest individual cooking marathon, 93 hours and 11 minutes. Founder of My Food by Hilda. The chef who put Nigerian cuisine on the front page of global media, and, when the cameras finally left, quietly fed a nation.

A Kitchen Inherited, A Record Made

Hilda Effiong Bassey, known professionally as Hilda Baci, is from Akwa Ibom State and grew up in the kitchen alongside a mother who owned a restaurant. She established My Food by Hilda in 2020, a restaurant and delivery service specialising in Nigerian and continental dishes.

“I cooked for 93 hours because I wanted the world to see that Nigerian food is worthy of the world’s attention. Every pot I made was a statement.”

93 Hours, Watched by the World

In May 2023, Hilda Baci cooked non-stop for 93 hours and 11 minutes, breaking the Guinness World Record for the longest cooking marathon by an individual. The event was watched live by hundreds of thousands across Nigeria and internationally. Her achievement was a deliberate act of cultural projection, using the spectacle of endurance to say to the world, look at what we cook, look at how seriously we take it, look at Nigeria.

The Mega Jollof That Fed a Nation

A record attempt that runs nearly four days does not produce a small pot of food. By the time Hilda Baci's marathon ended, her kitchen had turned out a mountain of jollof rice and other dishes on a scale most commercial kitchens never approach in a single week. Rather than let the food go to waste once the cameras and the Guinness adjudicators packed up, the harvest of that marathon was portioned, packaged and driven out to orphanages, shelters and vulnerable communities across Lagos and beyond. What began as a record attempt closed as a feeding programme, one woman's kitchen, at its absolute limit, quite literally feeding a nation for a day.

It is this second act, easy to miss beneath the headline of a broken record, that gives Hilda Baci's story its place in UNESCO REF's Flavours and Voices series. The same instinct that turns twelve million women's harvests into meals for their own households and, eventually, the nation's markets, is the instinct that turned one chef's marathon into thousands of plates for people who did not ask for a spectacle, only a meal. Feeding a nation, it turns out, takes many forms, a woman in a field before sunrise, and a woman who refused to leave her stove for 93 hours, telling the same story from two different kitchens.

Founder of Nigeria’s first culinary school, World Luxury Restaurant Award winner, and the chef who formalised the teaching and preservation of African cuisine as a professional discipline, Tiyan Alile occupies a singular place in the story of Nigerian food.

From the Courtroom to the Kitchen

Tiyan Alile is a Nigerian-American chef and restaurateur who changed the landscape of professional cooking in Nigeria when she established Culinary Academy, the country’s first formal culinary school, in 2012. A former lawyer who followed her passion into the kitchen, she has spent decades building the institutional infrastructure that allows Nigerian cuisine to be taught, documented and elevated to international fine dining standards.

“African cuisine is not a second-tier cuisine. It is one of the most sophisticated and diverse food traditions in the world. We are only now beginning to document it properly.”

A Table Recognised on the World Stage

Chef Alile’s restaurant Tarragon won the World Luxury Restaurant Award for fine dining and food presentation. She is the current president of the Culinary Arts Practitioners Association of Nigeria and has organised the African Young Chefs Competition, a platform designed to bring African indigenous cuisine to international attention. Her work is, in the most literal sense, a programme of culinary heritage preservation.

Across six geopolitical zones, YWA training sites are becoming something nobody quite planned for: destinations in their own right. Visitors now travel to walk the hydroponic rows, taste produce harvested that same morning, and watch, first-hand, what food sovereignty looks like when it is built from the ground up rather than announced from a podium. What began as agricultural infrastructure is turning into a new front in Nigeria’s tourism economy, one farm gate at a time.

Where Farms Became Destinations

No single decision turned YWA training sites into visitor destinations. It happened gradually, as word spread of hydroponic demonstration farms producing visibly, tangibly more than conventional plots, and as curious visitors, first partners and officials, then ordinary Nigerians, began asking to see the sites for themselves. UNESCO REF now treats that curiosity as an asset rather than a distraction, formalising site visits into a structured agro-tourism offering across all six zones.

What Visitors Actually See

A visit to a YWA site is deliberately unglamorous in the best sense: rows of hydroponic vegetables, women mid-shift explaining their own value chain, produce moving directly from vine to visitor. There is no staged demonstration, because the operation does not need one. What visitors are shown is simply the programme at work, which UNESCO REF has found to be more persuasive than any brochure.

“People come expecting to see a farm and leave having understood a movement. When a visitor watches a YWA Champion explain her own hydroponic system with total command, that does more for the programme than any report ever could.”

The Next Frontier

UNESCO REF is now exploring how to structure this interest more formally, guided farm tours, seasonal harvest visits, and partnerships with agro-tourism operators, without diverting attention from the sites’ core purpose. The ambition is straightforward: let the farm as destination model become one more way Nigerians encounter, and invest confidence in, the twelve million women rebuilding the country’s food system from the ground up.

In a significant move toward accelerating institutional collaboration on global development priorities, UNESCO REF President Prince Ladigbolu-Oranmiyan and Nigerian Army Officers’ Wives Association (NAOWA) President Hajia Safiyyah Hassan Shaibu held a high-level consultative engagement to identify and strengthen constructive institutional pathways for advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Nigeria.

The strategic consultation represents a convergence of complementary institutional mandates and a shared commitment to human-centred development. UNESCO REF brings seventeen years of multi-sectoral development experience and expertise, while NAOWA, with its extensive network and community-based humanitarian mission, brings institutional reach, women’s leadership, and grassroots implementation capacity.

Building Constructive Pathways to SDG Achievement

“This engagement reflects our collective recognition that sustainable development cannot be achieved through siloed institutional efforts. By aligning our institutional capacities and harmonising our development frameworks, we strengthen Nigeria’s overall commitment to the 2030 Agenda and demonstrate the power of collaborative governance.”

The consultation specifically examined mechanisms through which UNESCO REF’s SIP-ALPHA Framework, a comprehensive institutional upgrade designed to enhance multi-sectoral coordination and accelerate development outcomes, could be leveraged in partnership with NAOWA’s institutional platforms to create demonstrable impact on priority SDG areas.

Strategic Focus Areas

The SIP-ALPHA Framework: A Catalyst for Institutional Transformation

Central to the engagement was UNESCO REF’s SIP-ALPHA institutional upgrade, a transformative development framework designed to harmonise the efforts of multiple stakeholders, enhance institutional responsiveness, and mobilise collective capacity toward SDG achievement. The Framework represents a deliberate institutional evolution from siloed programming toward integrated, systems-based development approaches.

“The SIP-ALPHA Framework is not merely a programme design tool. It is a governance innovation, a way of thinking about how institutions can work together more effectively, learn from one another, and amplify their collective impact on the lives of ordinary Nigerians, particularly young people and rural communities.”

Bridging Implementation Gaps

Both institutional leaders recognised that Nigeria’s SDG journey requires more than policy alignment; it demands robust, practical partnerships that translate high-level commitments into community-level results. The consultation identified several implementation mechanisms:

• Co-convening of stakeholder platforms to strengthen coordination among development actors.
• Joint capacity-building initiatives to enhance institutional effectiveness and youth leadership.
• Collaborative design of development interventions that integrate best practices from both organisations.
• Advocacy and knowledge-sharing to amplify successful models and influence policy environments.

On 4 March 2025, the Maryam Babangida National Centre for Women Development in Abuja became the epicentre of a historic convergence of global leadership, national resolve, and grassroots mobilisation for the National Flag-Off of the UNESCO REF 12 Million Mobilisation Campaign for Young Women in Agriculture.

“Every woman empowered is a community strengthened, every girl educated is a nation advanced. Nigeria’s 12 Million Mobilisation Campaign is not just a national initiative; it is a global contribution to the 2030 Agenda.”

Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General

This campaign is designed to mobilise and equip 12 million Nigerian women and youth with advanced skills in Hydroponics and Agro-Kenaf Enterprise Development under the UNESCO REF SIP-Alpha programme, a movement of people, policy, and purpose.

The programme will mobilise 12 million women (2 million per geopolitical zone) across all 774 LGAs over 2024 to 2027, extendable to 2030, with guaranteed incomes of ₦300,000 to ₦400,000 every 12 weeks through value-chain agribusiness. SDG contributions: Goals 1, 2, 3, and 8.

The Read and Earn Federation for UNESCO (UNESCO REF) and UNICAF have formalized a landmark strategic partnership delivering an exclusive 86 percent scholarship coverage, unavailable through any other channel, for Nigerian students pursuing undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral qualifications through the UNESCO REF Educational Financial Facility Scheme (EFFS). Students qualifying through this exclusive arrangement pay only 14 percent of tuition costs. The remainder is fully funded.

This is a purpose-built, exclusive arrangement, not UNICAF’s standard scholarship rate. UNICAF has specifically structured this 86 percent coverage as its institutional contribution to advancing United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, directly aligned with the Federal Government of Nigeria’s education ambition and the Nigeria Education Loan Fund (NELFund) framework, which positions accessible, structured financing for Nigerian students as a national development priority.

“Nigeria cannot afford to leave talent stranded at the border of ambition and access. The UNESCO REF to UNICAF partnership dismantles the financial barriers that have kept thousands of qualified Nigerians from world-class credentials. This is not charity. This is strategic investment in the minds that will build Nigeria’s future.

“Through EFFS, we have created a transparent, scalable mechanism that combines structured study loans, institutional placement, and now, through UNICAF, scholarship coverage of 86 percent for those who qualify. Every Nigerian student who earns admission through the UNICAF platform under this scheme will pay only 14 percent of tuition costs. The rest is covered.

“This partnership aligns with the Renewed Hope Agenda’s commitment to human capital development, and it reflects UNESCO REF’s broader mandate under SIP-ALPHA Category 2 to expand educational access for financially constrained Nigerians. When we equip our youth with globally recognised qualifications, we strengthen the nation’s capacity to innovate, compete, and lead in a knowledge-driven economy.

“The window is open. The pathway is clear. Nigerian students ready to pursue their academic and professional futures internationally now have a credible, structured route forward. We will not wait for others to build our capacity. We are building it ourselves, one scholar at a time.”

“Education is the foundation of sustainable development and the most powerful driver of opportunity. Our collaboration with UNESCO REF through the Educational Financial Facility Scheme directly supports SDG 4: Quality Education, ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality tertiary education for all learners, in full accordance with the Incheon Declaration and Education 2030 Framework for Action.

“By offering up to 86 percent scholarship coverage, we are systematically expanding opportunities for Nigerian students to pursue higher education, regardless of socioeconomic barriers. This initiative operationalizes the principle of leaving no one behind, a cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

“This capacity-building initiative also aligns with the Federal Government of Nigeria’s Renewed Hope Agenda, which places human capital development and institutional strengthening at the heart of national progress. By empowering young Nigerians with knowledge and competencies, we are not only uplifting individuals but also strengthening the nation’s institutional capacity to innovate, compete, and thrive in a knowledge-based global economy.

“Together with UNESCO REF, we are committed to accelerating Nigeria’s educational transformation through development cooperation, creating sustainable pathways that unlock human potential, reduce inequality, and build inclusive prosperity for present and future generations.”

UNICAF Selection Criteria

• Global Institutional Reach: Operations across multiple continents with established institutional partnerships and internationally recognized qualifications.
• Affordability Model: 86% scholarship framework that is both sustainable and scalable for long-term impact.
• Quality Assurance: Partner institutions maintain accreditation standards recognized by UNESCO REF’s quality oversight protocols and international accreditation bodies.