2The problem, re-measured
Le problème, mesuré à nouveau
2.1 What the evidence shows
Ce que montrent les données
The most reliable picture of women’s farming in Nigeria comes from the General Household Survey Panel conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics with World Bank support. Analysis of its 2018–19 wave by the Nigeria Gender Innovation Lab, covering 5,922 plots managed by 2,852 plot managers, shows a gap at every stage of production (World Bank, 2023). Women are less likely to manage a plot at all. When they do, they farm less valuable crops, being 38 percentage points more likely than men to grow roots and tubers and 19 points less likely to grow cereals. They use fewer inputs: 25 per cent of women plot managers apply any fertiliser against 47 per cent of men, and men apply on average 87 per cent more per hectare. They have less contact with extension, in a system where a single extension officer serves more than 5,000 farmers. And the labour they hire is less productive for them than for men, because they pay more for it and command it less.
An earlier decomposition of the same survey is especially revealing for the argument of this article. Using an Oaxaca-Blinder method, Oseni et al. (2014) separated the gender gap into the part explained by differences in land, labour and inputs and the part that persists when women and men have the same resources. In the South, most of the gap disappeared once resources were equalised. In the North, women produced 28 per cent less than men even after controlling for observed inputs. A gap that survives equal endowments cannot be closed by supplying endowments alone. It reflects the returns women are able to draw from the resources they hold, and those returns are governed by norms, rules and authorities that sit outside any input programme.
2.2 The invisibility of women’s agricultural work
L'invisibilité du travail agricole des femmes
Policy documents in Nigeria and across Africa have long repeated that women produce 60 to 80 per cent of the continent’s food. The claim has no reliable empirical source (Doss, 2014). Using nationally representative time-use data from six African countries, Palacios-López et al. (2017) found that women supply about 40 per cent of crop labour on average; in Nigeria the figure is about 37 per cent (World Bank, 2023). Correcting the statistic matters for two reasons. It protects the credibility of the case for investment, which does not need to be overstated to be compelling. And it reveals the deeper problem: much of women’s agricultural work takes place on plots managed by men, in processing and in trade, where it is neither owned nor counted. The gap is not only in what women produce but in what they are recognised as producing.
This is why the YWA programme frames its target of twelve million women as a mobilisation target across agrifood systems, covering production, processing, storage and trade, rather than as a count of women plot managers. The figure is a statement of ambition and of scope. It is the task of the programme’s monitoring system, discussed in Section 8, to convert that ambition into verified enrolment and verified change.
2.3 Poverty, hunger and the cost of inaction
Pauvreté, faim et coût de l'inaction
The gender gap in agriculture sits within a wider crisis. The 2022 Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index found 63 per cent of the population, about 133 million people, to be multidimensionally poor, with incidence of 72 per cent in rural areas against 42 per cent in urban areas (NBS, 2022). The Cadre Harmonisé analysis of March 2024 projected 31.8 million people in acute food insecurity during that year’s lean season (FAO & WFP, 2024), and the World Food Programme projected 33.1 million for the 2025 lean season (WFP, 2024). Food inflation reached 40.87 per cent in June 2024 (NBS, 2024). On the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for 2024, Nigeria ranked 125th of 146 countries (WEF, 2024), despite having ratified CEDAW in 1985 and adopted the Maputo Protocol. International commitments, on their own, have not changed the institutions through which land, credit and knowledge reach women.
2.4 Where public money goes
Où va l'argent public
The institutional character of the problem is visible in the federal budget. Between 2016 and 2020, the four crop value chains that received the largest federal appropriations, cotton, rice, sorghum and cocoa, were among those with the lowest participation of women, with gender gaps in participation of between 64 and 88 percentage points. Maize and yams, two of the chains with the highest participation of women, were among the least funded in 2020 (World Bank, 2023). Inputs were distributed broadly in proportion to existing participation, which sustains productivity among current farmers but does little to bring women into higher-value chains. No single ministry designed this pattern. It is the product of how budgets, crop priorities and extension systems interact, which is precisely the kind of outcome that only an institutional analysis can explain.