Keywords: women in agriculture; Nigeria; women's history; intrahousehold allocation; gender productivity gap; empowerment; capability approach; agricultural policy

1. Introduction

1. Introduction

At the National Flag-Off of the Young Women in Agriculture Mobilisation Campaign, held at the Maryam Babangida National Centre for Women Development in Abuja on 4 March 2025, speaker after speaker returned to a single idea. The National President of the Police Officers' Wives Association described the campaign as a covenant with the Nigerian woman "as a sovereign actor in the agricultural economy". The Honourable Minister of Women Affairs declared that when women are empowered, families are stronger and communities safer. The National Coordinator spoke of the strength, resilience and determination of Nigerian women. The Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations compressed the argument into a sentence: every woman empowered is a community strengthened, every girl educated is a nation advanced.

Statements of this kind are familiar on International Women's Day, and their familiarity can make them seem ceremonial. This paper takes them seriously as propositions about the world. It asks four questions. First, what historical evidence supports the claim that Nigerian women have exercised strength in public, economic and political life? Second, what does economic research show about the consequences of women's income and productive activity for households and nations? Third, under what constraints is that strength exercised, and how large are the losses those constraints impose? Fourth, what follows for the design of a programme that proposes to mobilise twelve million young women into agricultural enterprise?

The questions matter because the design of public policy follows from its premises. A programme that regards women as vulnerable recipients will distribute assistance and measure its success by what it gives. A programme that regards women as capable agents held back by identifiable constraints will remove those constraints and measure its success by what women achieve. The two approaches produce different budgets, different institutions and different results. The Young Women in Agriculture Programme is founded on the second premise. This paper sets out the evidence for that premise, identifies where popular versions of it are inaccurate, and draws the design implications with as much precision as the evidence allows.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 describes the approach and sources. Section 3 clarifies what is meant by strength. Sections 4 and 5 establish the historical record of women's authority and economic institutions in Nigeria. Section 6 examines women's role in Nigerian agriculture today, including the measurement of women's labour. Sections 7 and 8 review the evidence on income control and the productivity gap. Section 9 examines the constraints under which women's strength is exercised. Section 10 introduces the theoretical frameworks that connect strength to capability. Section 11 reviews what interventions have been shown to work. Section 12 draws the implications for the Young Women in Agriculture Programme, Section 13 sets out limitations and a research agenda, and Section 14 concludes.

2. Approach and sources

2. Démarche et sources

This is a structured review of existing scholarship, not a report of new primary data. It draws on four literatures that are rarely read together: the historiography of women in Nigerian and West African societies; the economics of the household and of intrahousehold allocation; agricultural economics, particularly the measurement of labour and productivity by gender; and the theory and measurement of empowerment. The review privileges peer-reviewed studies, major institutional reports of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Bank, and established monographs. Where findings are contested, the paper says so. Where a popular statistic is not supported by the evidence, the paper identifies the better estimate.

Three limitations should be noted at the outset. First, historical sources on precolonial women leaders are uneven: some figures are documented in contemporary records, others are known mainly through oral tradition, and chronologies are sometimes uncertain. The paper treats traditions as evidence of how societies remember and value women's authority, while noting where dates or details are disputed. Second, much of the economic evidence comes from countries other than Nigeria; the paper relies on it where its mechanisms are general and identifies Nigerian evidence wherever it exists. Third, Nigeria is a country of great regional, religious and cultural diversity. Generalisations about "the Nigerian woman" are made with caution, and regional differences are noted where they matter.

3. What is meant by strength

3. Ce que l'on entend par force

The word strength is used in public speech in at least three senses, and conflating them leads to poor policy. The first is endurance: the capacity to bear hardship, to keep a household fed in a lean season, to absorb shocks. The second is capability: the capacity to produce, to decide, to organise and to lead. The third is authority: recognised standing in the institutions of a community, whether a market, a council or a state.

Much celebration of women's strength refers to the first sense. Endurance deserves respect, but it is an ambiguous basis for policy. A society that relies on women's endurance may simply be transferring to women the costs of its own failures, and praising them for absorbing those costs. Feminist economists have long warned against this, noting that the resilience of women in crises often reflects the extra unpaid work they undertake when public services and incomes fail.

This paper therefore concentrates on the second and third senses. It asks what women have been able to do and to direct when the conditions allowed, and what prevents them from doing more. In the language of Section 10, it is concerned less with how much women can bear than with the resources they command, the agency they exercise and the achievements that result. The distinction is not academic. A programme built on endurance asks women to do more with less. A programme built on capability gives women the means to do more, and expects them to do so.

One further clarification is needed. To speak of women's strength is not to claim that women are morally superior to men or uniformly alike. The evidence reviewed in Section 7, for example, shows that women tend to spend income differently from men; it does not show that this reflects an innate disposition. It reflects responsibilities, social expectations and bargaining positions, all of which vary across households and change over time. The case for investing in women rests on evidence about consequences, not on essentialist claims about character.

4. Strength as a historical fact

4. La force comme fait historique

The societies that became Nigeria offer one of the richest historical records anywhere of women exercising political, military, economic, spiritual and intellectual authority. That record matters for present policy because it refutes a common assumption, often held by external observers and sometimes internalised at home: that the public authority of women is a modern import. In Nigeria it is an inheritance.

Zazzau and the north. Queen Amina of Zazzau, whose reign is generally placed in the sixteenth century, is remembered in Hausa tradition and in later chronicles as a military commander who extended the influence of Zazzau along the trade routes of the region and who is credited with the earthen town walls known as ganuwar Amina. Historians debate the precise chronology and the extent of her conquests, but the durability of her memory across four centuries is itself evidence of how the society valued women's capacity to rule and to defend. In the early nineteenth century, Nana Asma'u bint Usman dan Fodio (1793 to 1864), daughter of the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, became one of the most important scholars of the region. She wrote extensively in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa, and organised a network of women teachers, the jaji, who carried learning to rural women through the movement known as the Yan Taru. Her legacy is a reminder that the education of women in northern Nigeria has deep indigenous roots.

Ile-Ife and Benin. The tradition of Moremi Ajasoro of Ile-Ife tells of a woman who allowed herself to be captured by raiders who threatened her city in order to learn the secret of their strength, and who, having delivered Ife, honoured her vow to the river deity at the cost of her only son, Oluorogbo. The story is commemorated in the Edi festival and is told to this day as a lesson in courage and in the price of public duty. In Benin, Queen Idia, mother of Oba Esigie in the early sixteenth century, is remembered for her political counsel and for raising forces in support of her son's reign. The title of Iyoba, the Queen Mother, was created in her honour, and the ivory pendant masks associated with her are among the most celebrated works of African art.

Institutions of women's authority. These were not isolated individuals. Many societies maintained offices through which women held recognised authority. Among the Yoruba, the chieftaincy title of Iyalode designated the leader and spokesperson of the women of a town, with a voice in its councils; in nineteenth-century Ibadan, the Iyalode Efunsetan Aniwura was among the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the city. Among the Igbo, scholars have described a dual-sex political system in which women's institutions, such as the Omu in some riverine communities and women's assemblies in many villages, governed matters of concern to women and could sanction men who violated their interests. Ifi Amadiume's study of Nnobi showed how flexible gender systems allowed women to hold titles, accumulate wealth and occupy roles conventionally associated with men. In Lagos and Abeokuta, Madam Efunroye Tinubu built a commercial and political position in the nineteenth century that made her one of the most consequential figures of her era.

Colonial disruption and resistance. Colonial administration generally recognised male authority and ignored or dismantled women's institutions, a process that scholars have described as a narrowing of women's political space. Women resisted. In November and December 1929, tens of thousands of women in the Owerri and Calabar provinces mobilised against the abuses of warrant chiefs and against rumours that women would be taxed, in the uprising the colonial authorities called the Aba Riots and Igbo women remember as Ogu Umunwaanyi, the Women's War. Drawing on established practices of collective sanction, they compelled a commission of inquiry and reforms of colonial administration. Dozens of women were killed when troops opened fire. In the 1940s, the Abeokuta Women's Union, led by Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, organised market women against unjust taxation and arbitrary rule, and its sustained campaign contributed to the temporary abdication of the Alake of Abeokuta in 1949. In the decades that followed, Margaret Ekpo in the east and Hajiya Gambo Sawaba in the north carried women's political organisation into the struggle for independence and the first republic.

Table 1. Selected figures and movements in the history of Nigerian women's authority

Tableau 1. Figures et mouvements choisis de l'histoire de l'autorité des femmes nigérianes

Sources: see Section 4 and References, notably Amadiume (1987), Boyd and Mack (1997), Johnson-Odim and Mba (1997), Mba (1982) and Van Allen (1972).

Three conclusions follow from this record. First, the public authority of women is part of Nigeria's own political tradition, across north and south, Muslim and Christian, before and after colonial rule. Second, that authority has repeatedly been exercised through organisation: through offices, associations, unions, councils and networks of women acting together. Third, women's political action has often been economic in its origin, provoked by taxation, threats to trade or the loss of livelihood. The strength of the Nigerian woman has always been closely tied to her economic position, and it has always been strongest when organised.

5. The market woman and her institutions

5. La commerçante et ses institutions

No figure expresses the economic dimension of women's strength more clearly than the market woman. In the markets of Lagos, Ibadan, Onitsha, Aba, Kano and countless smaller towns, women have long dominated the trade in foodstuffs, textiles and household goods. In Yoruba towns, the Iyaloja, the recognised head of the market women, represents traders before the authorities, mediates disputes and influences the regulation of trade. Market associations organised by commodity regulate conduct, extend credit to members and act collectively when their interests are threatened. The market is, in this sense, a women's institution with its own system of governance.

The market woman also carries a financial tradition older than modern banking. Rotating savings and credit associations allow members to contribute a fixed sum at regular intervals and to receive the pooled fund in turn. They are known as esusu or ajo among the Yoruba, adashe among the Hausa and isusu or various local names among the Igbo. The anthropologist William Bascom described the Yoruba esusu as a credit institution in a study published in 1952, and such associations remain widespread. They demonstrate a capacity for saving, for enforcing obligations through trust and reputation, and for collective discipline that formal finance has been slow to recognise and slower still to serve.

Women's economic agency is not confined to societies in which women trade openly. In parts of northern Nigeria where married women observe seclusion, research by Enid Schildkrout and others in Kano documented an extensive home-based economy in which women prepare and sell food, process crops and run small enterprises, often using children as intermediaries with the market. Seclusion shapes the form of women's economic activity; it does not abolish it. This matters for programme design, because enterprises that can be conducted from or near the home, such as hydroponic production, may suit women whose mobility is constrained by custom, care responsibilities or insecurity.

Table 2. Women's indigenous economic institutions in Nigeria

Tableau 2. Les institutions économiques autochtones des femmes au Nigeria

The relevance to agriculture is direct. In large parts of Nigeria women are not only producers of food; they are also its processors and traders, the link between farm and consumer. A programme that organises women in production clusters, connects them to assured buyers and builds their capacity to contract and account is not introducing an alien model. It is formalising and scaling commercial competences that Nigerian women have exercised for generations, and drawing on institutions of trust that already exist.

6. Women in Nigerian agriculture today

6. Les femmes dans l'agriculture nigériane aujourd'hui

A meticulous argument must begin with accurate numbers. It is frequently asserted, in policy documents and public speeches across Africa, that women produce 60 to 80 per cent of the continent's food or provide a similar share of its agricultural labour. The figure has a long history; it appears to derive from estimates made in the 1970s and repeated without fresh evidence for decades. Cheryl Doss, examining the claim, found no robust empirical basis for it and showed that the answer depends heavily on what is measured: labour, output, land, or the value of production.

The most careful recent estimate comes from Amparo Palacios-Lopez, Luc Christiaensen and Talip Kilic, who used nationally representative household surveys with plot-level labour data from six African countries, including Nigeria. They estimated that women provide about 40 per cent of crop labour across the six countries, with wide variation: from 24 per cent in Niger to 56 per cent in Uganda. For Nigeria they reported separate estimates for the north and the south: about 32 per cent in northern Nigeria and about 51 per cent in southern Nigeria.

Table 3. Women's share of crop labour, selected African countries

Tableau 3. Part des femmes dans le travail agricole, pays africains choisis

Source: Palacios-Lopez, Christiaensen and Kilic (2017), based on Living Standards Measurement Study surveys. Figures measure labour on crop plots and exclude much processing, marketing and livestock work.

Three observations follow. First, the correct figures are smaller than the popular ones but still very large: in southern Nigeria women provide roughly half of all crop labour, and nationally they provide a substantial minority. Second, these estimates measure labour on crop plots. They do not fully capture women's work in post-harvest processing, food preparation, small livestock and trade, where women's share is often greater. Third, the regional difference within Nigeria is itself significant for policy, reflecting differences in religion, custom, crops and the organisation of household production. A national programme must be designed for both patterns.

Why should a paper that celebrates women's strength take care to correct an exaggerated figure? Because the case for investing in women does not need exaggeration, and exaggeration weakens it. Policymakers and investors who discover that a headline statistic is unsupported may discount the whole argument. The accurate picture is strong enough: women are a large part of Nigeria's agricultural labour force, a larger part of its food processing and trade, and, as Section 8 shows, a part whose productivity is held back by remediable constraints.

Women's role in Nigerian agriculture is also changing. Rising education among young women, rapid urbanisation, the growth of peri-urban markets for vegetables and processed foods, and new technologies such as controlled-environment production are creating opportunities that did not exist a generation ago. The young women whom the campaign seeks to mobilise are, on average, better educated and more connected than their mothers. They are well placed to take up enterprises that combine agricultural production with technology and trade, provided the constraints described in Section 9 are addressed.

7. Who controls income, and why it matters

7. Qui contrôle le revenu, et pourquoi cela compte

If history establishes women's capacity, economics establishes the consequences of strengthening it. The central finding of four decades of research on the household is that it matters which member controls income.

From the unitary household to bargaining. Early economic models treated the household as a single decision-maker with a single set of preferences, the so-called unitary model. In that model it makes no difference whether a sum of money is received by the husband or the wife, because it is pooled and spent according to common preferences. From the 1980s, economists developed collective and bargaining models in which household members have different preferences and decisions reflect their relative bargaining power. Pierre-André Chiappori's collective model of household labour supply was an important theoretical step. These models predict that shifting income towards women will change what households spend money on. The prediction has been tested many times, and the unitary model has generally been rejected.

The evidence. In a study of Brazilian households, Duncan Thomas found that unearned income in the hands of mothers had a substantially larger effect on child health and survival than the same income in the hands of fathers. John Hoddinott and Lawrence Haddad, studying households in Côte d'Ivoire, found that raising women's share of cash income increased the share of the budget spent on food and reduced spending on alcohol and cigarettes. Esther Duflo, examining an expansion of old-age pensions in South Africa, found that pensions received by grandmothers were associated with markedly better height and weight among girls in their households, while pensions received by grandfathers showed no comparable effect. Agnes Quisumbing and John Maluccio, studying Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ethiopia and South Africa, found that the assets women brought to marriage influenced household spending on education and other outcomes.

Table 4. Selected studies on women's control of income and household outcomes

Tableau 4. Études choisies sur le contrôle du revenu par les femmes et les résultats des ménages

The qualifications. A meticulous reading requires two qualifications. First, the effects are averages; they do not mean that every woman spends better than every man. Second, a systematic review by Joanne Yoong, Lila Rabinovich and Stephanie Diepeveen found the evidence that transfers targeted at women improve outcomes more than transfers to men to be suggestive rather than conclusive, with results depending on context and programme design. The direction of the evidence is consistent; its size varies.

Interpretation. The pattern does not reflect any innate virtue of women. It reflects women's customary responsibility for feeding the household and caring for children, preferences shaped by those responsibilities, and bargaining positions that determine whose preferences prevail. When women's income rises, their bargaining position improves and household spending shifts towards their priorities, which are frequently the priorities on which the household's future depends.

This is the economic content of the Deputy Secretary-General's sentence at the Flag-Off. When a woman's income rises, her community is strengthened through her household. The policy implication is concrete: a programme that seeks household nutrition and school retention should place income directly in women's hands, through accounts in their own names, and should support their capacity to decide how it is used.

8. The productivity gap and its cost

8. L'écart de productivité et son coût

The second body of economic evidence concerns agricultural productivity. It is consistent and striking: on average, plots managed by women produce less per hectare than plots managed by men, and the difference is explained not by any lack of ability but by unequal access to the inputs and services on which productivity depends.

Global estimates. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in its report The State of Food and Agriculture 2010 to 2011, documented this gap across the developing world. It estimated that if women farmers had the same access to productive resources as men, yields on their farms could rise by 20 to 30 per cent. That would raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 per cent and could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 per cent, or some 100 to 150 million people. More than a decade later, in The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems (2023), the organisation found that the gaps persisted. It estimated that closing the gender gap in farm productivity and in agrifood wages would increase global gross domestic product by nearly one per cent, about one trillion United States dollars, and reduce the number of food-insecure people by about 45 million.

African and Nigerian evidence. A joint study by the World Bank and the ONE Campaign, Levelling the Field (2014), used nationally representative data from six African countries, including Nigeria, and found gender gaps in agricultural productivity ranging from roughly a quarter to two thirds across the countries studied. Studies of Nigeria specifically, including work by Gbemisola Oseni and colleagues using the General Household Survey Panel, have found substantial gaps, larger in the north than in the south, and have decomposed them into differences in the quantity and quality of inputs, access to hired labour, land characteristics and the returns women obtain from the same inputs.

Mechanisms. The research identifies several recurrent mechanisms. Women's plots receive less fertiliser and improved seed. Women find it harder to hire and supervise male labour, and their own labour is constrained by household responsibilities. Women's plots are often smaller, less secure and of lower quality. Women receive less extension advice and less credit. And women frequently sell through less remunerative channels. Each mechanism is a constraint that policy can address.

Table 5. Estimates of the gains from closing gender gaps in agriculture

Tableau 5. Estimations des gains liés à la réduction des écarts entre les sexes dans l'agriculture

Interpretation. The productivity gap is often cited as evidence of women's disadvantage. It is more usefully read as evidence of unused capacity. A woman who produces less than her potential because she lacks credit, quality inputs, labour or a buyer is not weak; her strength is constrained. Remove the constraint and the strength appears in the yield. For Nigeria, which spends heavily on food imports and faces acute food insecurity, the unused productive capacity of women farmers is among the largest and least costly reserves available to national food policy.

9. Strength under constraint

9. La force sous contrainte

It would be a disservice to Nigerian women to celebrate their strength without naming the conditions under which it is exercised. Five constraints are especially consequential for agriculture, and each is the subject of a substantial literature.

Land. The Land Use Act of 1978 vests land in each state in the Governor, to be held in trust, while customary systems continue to govern access to much rural land. Under many customary arrangements, women's access to land is mediated by fathers, husbands or male relatives, and inheritance practices often favour sons. Documented, individual rights for women are uncommon. Without secure tenure, a woman cannot easily use land as collateral, has weaker incentives to invest in its long-term productivity, and risks losing access on widowhood or divorce. Evidence from land tenure regularisation in Rwanda, discussed in Section 11, shows that formal recognition of women's rights can increase investment.

Finance. Financial inclusion surveys in Nigeria have consistently found a gender gap in access to formal financial services. Women's limited collateral, their concentration in informal enterprises and lending practices designed around male borrowers restrict their access to credit, even where their repayment discipline, demonstrated in rotating savings associations, is strong. Agricultural credit, which must bridge the long interval between planting and harvest, is particularly difficult to obtain.

Time. Women carry the greater part of unpaid care and domestic work: preparing food, fetching water and fuel, and caring for children, the sick and the elderly. Time-use research across Africa consistently shows that women's total working hours, paid and unpaid, exceed men's. Time poverty limits the hours women can give to production, training and trade, and it explains part of the productivity gap. Programmes that ignore it may add to women's burdens rather than reduce them.

Information and technology. Agricultural extension has historically reached women less than men, partly because extension workers have been predominantly male and partly because women's mobility is more constrained. New technologies have often been introduced through channels women do not control. The gender gap in mobile phone ownership and internet use, documented in many countries including Nigeria, risks reproducing this exclusion as agricultural services move to digital platforms.

Safety and mobility. In parts of Nigeria, insecurity on roads and farms restricts women's movement and exposes them to violence when they travel to fields and markets. Custom also constrains the mobility of some women. Enterprises that require long journeys or unaccompanied travel are, for these women, less accessible than those conducted near the home.

These constraints help to explain a fact that is easy to overlook: the remarkable resilience women show under economic stress is, in part, a measure of the burdens they carry. Resilience should be admired, but it should not be required. The object of policy is not to demand ever greater endurance from women, but to reduce the constraints that make endurance necessary. A woman freed from them does not become less strong. She becomes more productive, and her strength is applied to building rather than to coping.

10. From strength to capability

10. De la force à la capabilité

Three theoretical frameworks connect the historical and empirical findings to policy.

The capability approach. Amartya Sen argued that development should be judged not by income alone but by the expansion of the real freedoms that people have to lead the lives they have reason to value. Income matters because of what it allows a person to be and to do: to be nourished and healthy, to be educated, to take part in the life of the community, to appear in public without shame. On this view, a programme that raises a woman's income while leaving her without voice or choice has achieved less than it appears, and a programme that expands both has achieved more. Martha Nussbaum developed the approach into a list of central human capabilities, among them control over one's environment, including the ability to hold property and to seek employment on an equal basis with others. Her work drew extensively on the lives of women in developing countries.

Resources, agency and achievements. Naila Kabeer defined empowerment as the expansion of people's ability to make strategic life choices in contexts where that ability was previously denied. She identified three interrelated dimensions: resources, the material, human and social assets on which choices depend; agency, the ability to define goals and act upon them, including through negotiation and resistance; and achievements, the outcomes that result. Her framework has a practical consequence for programme design. Resources are necessary but not sufficient: they become empowerment only when women can exercise agency over their use, and agency becomes durable when it produces visible achievements that change how women are regarded.

Measurement. These ideas have been made measurable. The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, launched in 2012 by the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United States Agency for International Development, assesses empowerment across five domains: decisions about agricultural production; access to and control over productive resources; control over the use of income; leadership in the community; and the use of time. A project-level version, pro-WEAI, was subsequently developed for programme evaluation. The existence of such instruments means that a programme's claim to empower women can be tested rather than merely asserted.

Collective strength. A fourth idea completes the framework. The historical record in Sections 4 and 5 shows that Nigerian women's authority has been strongest when exercised collectively. Research on women's groups, savings groups and producer organisations supports this: groups reduce transaction costs, enable bulk purchase and sale, provide mutual insurance, transmit information and strengthen bargaining power with buyers, officials and, sometimes, husbands. Empowerment is not only an individual attribute. It is also a property of organised communities of women.

11. What the evidence says works

11. Ce qui fonctionne selon les données

Recognising women's strength and naming their constraints is the beginning of policy, not its end. The decisive question is which interventions reliably convert strength into prosperity. Rigorous evaluations over the past two decades allow some confident answers.

Integrated approaches outperform single inputs. The most influential evidence comes from the evaluation of the graduation approach, which combines a productive asset, training, coaching, temporary consumption support and access to savings. A study by Abhijit Banerjee and colleagues across six countries, published in Science in 2015, found lasting gains in consumption, assets, income and wellbeing among very poor households, most of them headed or represented by women, persisting a year after the programme ended. The lesson is that constraints interact, and removing one while leaving the others often fails.

Secure land rights increase investment. Daniel Ayalew Ali, Klaus Deininger and Markus Goldstein evaluated a pilot of land tenure regularisation in Rwanda, which registered land rights including those of women. They found increased investment in soil conservation, with particularly strong effects for female-headed households, and improvements in the recorded land rights of legally married women. Security of tenure changes incentives.

Savings groups and collective finance help. Village savings and loan associations, which formalise the logic of the rotating savings associations described in Section 5, have been evaluated in several African countries. The results generally show improvements in savings, household business activity and resilience to shocks, though effects on income are typically modest. They are a foundation, not a complete solution.

Market access is decisive. Across many evaluations, interventions that raise production without securing a market frequently disappoint, because surplus output depresses local prices or goes unsold. Contract farming and structured off-take arrangements can reduce this risk, though their benefits depend on fair terms, reliable buyers and the bargaining power of producers.

Design for women, not merely open to women. Programmes that are formally open to everyone but designed around men's circumstances tend to enrol and benefit women less. Evidence on agricultural extension shows that women are more likely to adopt practices when information is delivered by trusted peers, by female extension workers, or at times and places compatible with women's responsibilities.

Table 6. Interventions and the evidence on their effects for women

Tableau 6. Interventions et données sur leurs effets pour les femmes

12. Implications for the Young Women in Agriculture Programme

12. Conséquences pour le programme YWA

The evidence reviewed in this paper yields eight design principles. For each, the paper identifies the constraint addressed and an indicator by which progress can be measured. Several are already embodied in the programme's architecture; others represent commitments that the evidence makes essential.

Principle 1: Build on organisation. Nigerian women's strength has historically been exercised collectively. The programme should organise champions in production clusters with recognised leadership, drawing on the model of market associations, and mobilise through women's associations, beginning with POWA and NAOWA.

Principle 2: Secure the market first. Off-take agreements concluded before planting remove the risk that has most often defeated women producers. Their terms should be transparent, fair and enforceable.

Principle 3: Put income in women's hands. Because income controlled by women is spent disproportionately on nutrition and schooling, off-take payments should be made directly to the women who produce, through accounts in their own names.

Principle 4: Address land security. Enrolment should include arrangements that give women documented, secure access to the land they cultivate for at least the duration of their enterprise, through agreements with families, communities, state governments or institutional landholders.

Principle 5: Build on women's finance. Group savings, modelled on esusu and adashe, should be integrated with the programme's blended finance architecture, so that women build savings, credit histories and repayment discipline together.

Principle 6: Respect time and mobility. Training should be flexible and close to home, delivered in five languages and at times compatible with care responsibilities. Home-adjacent hydroponic enterprises suit women whose mobility is constrained by custom, care or insecurity.

Principle 7: Design for both north and south. The regional difference in women's agricultural roles calls for differentiated approaches: more home-based and processing enterprises where seclusion or insecurity limits field work, and more field-based production where women already farm extensively.

Principle 8: Measure empowerment, not only income. The programme should track control over income, decision-making, leadership and time use, using an adaptation of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index alongside measures of yield, income and household nutrition.

Table 7. From constraint to design to indicator

Tableau 7. De la contrainte à la conception puis à l'indicateur

13. Limitations and research agenda

13. Limites et programme de recherche

This paper has relied on existing scholarship, and its conclusions are only as strong as that scholarship. Much of the causal evidence on income control comes from outside Nigeria. The historical record of precolonial women leaders is partly oral and contested in its details. And evidence on what works is strongest for small and medium-sized programmes; a programme of twelve million participants will encounter problems of implementation, quality and fairness that smaller programmes do not.

These limitations define a research agenda. The programme's scale and staggered enrolment offer an exceptional opportunity to generate Nigerian evidence. Four questions deserve priority. First, how large are the effects of the programme on women's income, household nutrition and children's schooling, compared with similar women not yet enrolled? Second, do effects differ between north and south, rural and urban, and kenaf and hydroponic enterprises? Third, does direct payment to women's accounts change control over income and household spending, as the literature predicts? Fourth, what happens to women's empowerment, measured across the domains of the index, and does it persist? UNESCO REF invites research partners to examine these questions with the programme, and commits to publishing the results, whatever they show.

14. Conclusion

14. Conclusion

The strength of a woman is the oldest resource in Nigeria's history and among the least fully used in its economy. The record of Amina, Idia, Moremi, Nana Asma'u, Efunsetan Aniwura, Madam Tinubu, the women of 1929 and the Abeokuta Women's Union shows that Nigerian women have ruled, taught, traded, organised and resisted for centuries. Their market associations and savings institutions show economic competence of a high order. Economic research shows that when women control income, households eat better and children stay in school; and that when women farmers gain equal access to resources, nations produce more food and fewer people go hungry.

The evidence also shows why that strength has so often been confined to endurance: land held insecurely, finance withheld, time consumed by unpaid work, information delivered elsewhere and mobility restricted. These constraints are not features of women. They are features of institutions, and institutions can be changed.

The Young Women in Agriculture Programme is built on the conclusion that follows from all three bodies of evidence. Nigeria does not need to create strength in its women. It needs to remove the constraints that keep that strength from becoming prosperity, and to organise it, as Nigerian women have always organised it, so that it can act together. Twelve million young women, organised in clusters, certified, assured of a market, secure in their access to land and in control of their income, would not be the beneficiaries of national development. They would be among its principal authors.

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Cite as: UNESCO REF (2026). The strength of a woman: history, agency and the economics of Nigerian women in agriculture. YWA Campaign Papers, No. 1. Abuja: UNESCO REF. This paper is a structured review of published scholarship. Page ranges should be confirmed against the original publications before formal citation.

Keywords: food security; human security; conflict; Nigeria; livelihoods; women, peace and security; non-kinetic security; policing; agricultural policy

1. Introduction

1. Introduction

Security has traditionally been understood as the protection of the state and its citizens against armed threat, and its instruments as the police, the armed forces and the intelligence services. Those instruments remain indispensable. Yet at the National Flag-Off of the Young Women in Agriculture Mobilisation Campaign, the most senior police officer in Nigeria chose to argue that the empowerment of women in agriculture is itself a security measure. "Food security is national security," the Inspector-General declared. "When our women and youth are empowered to produce food, to create wealth and to sustain their families, we are not only reducing hunger but also reducing crime, insecurity and instability. A well-fed nation is a safer nation." The campaign was anchored, in his words, as a non-kinetic approach to national security and household stability.

The claim has consequences for how public resources are allocated and how programmes are judged. If it is correct, investment in women's agricultural enterprise is not only social policy but security policy, and should be planned, financed, targeted and evaluated accordingly. If it is overstated, a programme risks promising a dividend it cannot deliver, and disappointing those who financed it on that basis. This paper asks what the evidence supports, through which mechanisms, under what conditions, and with what risks.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes its approach. Section 3 defines the central concepts. Section 4 sets out the theoretical mechanisms linking hunger, livelihoods and insecurity. Section 5 reviews the global evidence. Section 6 examines whether livelihood programmes reduce violence in practice. Section 7 examines Nigeria's food and security crises. Section 8 considers why women matter to stability, and Section 9 the role of non-kinetic security and the police. Section 10 sets out a theory of change for the Young Women in Agriculture Programme, Section 11 the conditions for a security dividend, Section 12 the risks of doing harm, and Section 13 an evaluation design and research agenda. Section 14 concludes.

2. Approach and sources

2. Démarche et sources

This paper is a structured review of published research and official data, not a report of new primary data. It draws on the literature of security studies and conflict economics, the literature on food security and food prices, impact evaluations of livelihood and employment programmes in fragile settings, research on women, peace and security, and official Nigerian and international data on food insecurity. It gives particular weight to studies that identify causal effects rather than correlations, and it reports evidence that complicates the argument as well as evidence that supports it.

Two cautions apply throughout. First, the relationship between food and conflict runs in both directions: hunger can contribute to conflict, and conflict causes hunger by destroying farms, markets and livelihoods. Distinguishing the two directions is one of the central challenges of the research, and many studies are designed specifically to do so. Second, conflict is always the product of many causes. To show that food insecurity raises the risk of violence is not to claim that it is the only or the principal cause of any particular conflict.

3. Concepts

3. Concepts

Food security. The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing "when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life". The definition is conventionally understood through four dimensions: availability of food; access to it, through income, production or transfers; utilisation, meaning the nutritional use of food, which depends on health, water and sanitation; and stability of the other three over time. The High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition has proposed adding agency and sustainability as further dimensions. The Young Women in Agriculture Programme addresses availability through production, access through income, and stability through year-round hydroponic output and assured off-take.

National security and human security. National security in its traditional sense concerns the protection of the territory, institutions and citizens of the state against organised threats. The Human Development Report of 1994, published by the United Nations Development Programme, proposed a wider concept of human security, defined as freedom from fear and freedom from want. The report argued that for most people insecurity arises less from external aggression than from threats in daily life, and identified seven dimensions: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. The Commission on Human Security developed the idea further in Human Security Now (2003), and the United Nations General Assembly adopted a common understanding of human security in resolution 66/290 of 2012. The human security perspective does not replace the traditional one. It recognises that the security of the state rests ultimately on the security of its people.

Non-kinetic security. The term non-kinetic refers to measures that reduce threats without the use of force. In the security literature it covers a wide range of instruments: community engagement and policing by consent, mediation and dialogue, the provision of services and livelihoods, education, strategic communication and the strengthening of local institutions. Non-kinetic measures do not replace kinetic capacity where violence is active; they address the conditions in which violence arises and is sustained, and they are generally less costly and less likely to generate new grievances.

Table 1. Dimensions of food security and how the YWA Programme engages them

Tableau 1. Dimensions de la sécurité alimentaire et leur prise en compte par le programme YWA

4. Why hunger and insecurity are linked: the mechanisms

4. Pourquoi la faim et l'insécurité sont liées : les mécanismes

Scholarship offers several mechanisms through which food insecurity and the loss of livelihoods can raise the risk of crime, unrest and armed violence. They are not mutually exclusive, and in practice they operate together.

Opportunity cost. The economics of crime, developed by Gary Becker, treats participation in crime as a choice influenced by its expected costs and benefits, including the lawful income forgone. Applied to armed conflict, the argument holds that where lawful livelihoods are scarce and poorly paid, the cost of joining an armed group is low, and recruitment is easier. Improving lawful livelihoods raises that cost. This mechanism underlies much of the case for employment and livelihood programmes in fragile settings.

Grievance and relative deprivation. Ted Robert Gurr argued in Why Men Rebel (1970) that collective violence arises when people perceive a gap between what they believe they are entitled to and what they actually receive. Rising food prices, the loss of land or livelihood, or perceived unfairness in the distribution of resources can widen that gap and supply grievances that political entrepreneurs mobilise.

The moral economy. The historian E. P. Thompson, studying food riots in eighteenth-century England, showed that crowds acted not simply from hunger but from a shared sense of what was just in the provision of bread, a "moral economy" that authorities were expected to uphold. When food becomes unaffordable, protest is often directed at the state or at those seen to profit, and the legitimacy of authority is at stake. The insight helps to explain why food price spikes so frequently become political events.

State capacity. James Fearon and David Laitin, in an influential study of civil wars, found that conditions favouring insurgency, including poverty and weak state capacity, predicted conflict better than ethnic or religious diversity. Food crises can strain state capacity and public finances, while the provision of food security and livelihoods can extend the presence and legitimacy of the state, particularly in remote areas.

Competition over resources. Where land and water are under pressure from population growth, environmental change and insecurity, competition between groups whose livelihoods depend on them can turn violent. Programmes that increase the productivity of existing land, or that generate income without additional land, can relieve that pressure at the margin.

Threat multiplication. Across these mechanisms, the literature converges on a description of food insecurity as a threat multiplier: a condition that amplifies the effects of other stresses rather than one that produces conflict on its own.

Table 2. Mechanisms linking food insecurity, livelihoods and insecurity

Tableau 2. Mécanismes reliant insécurité alimentaire, moyens de subsistance et insécurité

5. The global evidence

5. Les données mondiales

Food prices and unrest. The global food price crises of 2007 to 2008 and 2010 to 2011, which were accompanied by protests and riots in dozens of countries, stimulated extensive research. Marc Bellemare, using monthly international data and methods designed to separate cause from effect, found that increases in food price levels were associated with increases in the incidence of social unrest, while the evidence that price volatility as such caused unrest was weaker. Marco Lagi, Karla Bertrand and Yaneer Bar-Yam observed that waves of unrest in North Africa and the Middle East in 2008 and 2011 coincided with peaks in the food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization, and argued that high food prices create conditions in which other grievances become explosive.

Food insecurity and violent conflict. A review for the World Food Programme by Henk-Jan Brinkman and Cullen Hendrix concluded that food insecurity, especially when caused by higher food prices, heightens the risk of democratic breakdown, civil conflict, protest, rioting and communal conflict, and that the relationship runs in both directions. Clionadh Raleigh, Hyun Jin Choi and Dominic Kniveton, studying markets across Africa, found that rising food prices were associated with more conflict events, and that conflict in turn raised local food prices. A later review by Charles Martin-Shields and Wolfgang Stojetz emphasised the measurement challenges in this literature and the importance of local, disaggregated data.

Economic shocks and civil conflict. Some of the most persuasive evidence uses weather as a natural experiment. Because rainfall is not caused by conflict, its effect on agricultural income can be used to identify the effect of income on violence. Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath and Ernest Sergenti, studying African countries, found that negative growth shocks driven by poor rainfall significantly increased the likelihood of civil conflict in the following year. Marshall Burke and colleagues found a historical association between higher temperatures and civil war in Africa. A meta-analysis by Solomon Hsiang, Marshall Burke and Edward Miguel, covering many studies, concluded that deviations in climate towards warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall are associated with increases in interpersonal and intergroup violence. These findings are debated, particularly as to their size and generality, but they consistently point to agricultural income as a pathway.

Table 3. Selected evidence on food, income and conflict

Tableau 3. Données choisies sur l'alimentation, le revenu et les conflits

Taken together, the global evidence supports a precise version of the Inspector-General's proposition. Food insecurity and shocks to agricultural income raise the risk of unrest and violence. The effect is conditional on other factors, and it is not inevitable. But across many settings and methods, its direction is consistent.

6. Do livelihood programmes reduce violence?

6. Les programmes de moyens de subsistance réduisent-ils la violence ?

That food insecurity raises the risk of violence does not by itself establish that livelihood programmes reduce it. The question has been examined directly in a growing number of evaluations, and the answers are instructive precisely because they are mixed.

Evidence of reduced violence and recruitment. Christopher Blattman and Jeannie Annan evaluated an agricultural training and capital programme for high-risk young men in Liberia, many of them former fighters engaged in illicit activities. The programme increased farming and reduced participation in illicit resource extraction, and it reduced interest in mercenary recruitment during the crisis in neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire. Notably, the effect was strongest among those who expected to receive the programme's future cash support, suggesting that the prospect of continued lawful income mattered. Aditya Dasgupta, Kishore Gawande and Devesh Kapur found that India's national rural employment guarantee was associated with a substantial reduction in Maoist violence in the districts where it was implemented. In Uganda, Christopher Blattman, Nathan Fiala and Sebastian Martinez found that unconditional grants to groups of young people for vocational training and enterprise raised earnings substantially, though effects on social cohesion and aggression were limited.

Evidence of unintended harm. Other studies sound a warning. Benjamin Crost, Joseph Felter and Patrick Johnston found that a large community-driven development programme in the Philippines was followed by an increase in insurgent violence in eligible municipalities, apparently because insurgents sought to sabotage a programme that threatened to strengthen the government's standing. Research on aid in conflict zones has also shown that resources can be captured or taxed by armed groups, or can become a prize that intensifies competition.

Table 4. Evaluations of livelihood and development programmes and violence

Tableau 4. Évaluations des programmes de moyens de subsistance et de développement et violence

Lessons. Four lessons emerge. First, the predictability of income matters: the Liberian evidence suggests that what deters recruitment is not only current income but the expectation of future income. Second, scale matters: large programmes that reach many people can shift the incentives of a population, not merely of individuals. Third, income gains do not automatically translate into social outcomes such as cohesion, which may require additional components. Fourth, programmes that strengthen the state's standing in contested areas may provoke resistance, so protection, community ownership and careful sequencing are essential. Each lesson informs the conditions set out in Section 11.

7. Nigeria: food insecurity and insecurity

7. Le Nigeria : insécurité alimentaire et insécurité

The food crisis. Nigeria's food situation has deteriorated markedly in recent years. In July 2023 the Federal Government declared a state of emergency on food security, treating the availability and affordability of food as a matter of national security. Food inflation, as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics, rose above 40 per cent in mid-2024, eroding household purchasing power across the country. The Cadre Harmonisé, the regional framework for analysing acute food insecurity used by the Nigerian authorities and their partners, estimated in its October 2025 analysis that 27.2 million people across 27 states and the Federal Capital Territory were in crisis or worse between October and December 2025, and projected that 34.7 million would be in that situation during the lean season of June to August 2026.

The security crisis. At the same time, Nigeria faces several distinct security challenges. In the North East, the insurgency associated with Boko Haram and its offshoots, active since 2009, has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than two million. In the North West and parts of the North Central zone, armed banditry, cattle rustling and mass kidnapping have devastated rural communities, as documented by the International Crisis Group. In the Middle Belt, violent clashes between farmers and herders over land, water and livestock routes have become among the deadliest forms of conflict in the country. Criminal violence, including kidnapping for ransom, affects many other areas.

Table 5. Principal security challenges by zone and their links to livelihoods

Tableau 5. Principaux défis sécuritaires par zone et leurs liens avec les moyens de subsistance

Sources: International Crisis Group reports; Cadre Harmonisé; national and international reporting. The table summarises dominant patterns and does not imply that every state in a zone is affected in the same way.

A vicious circle. The two crises reinforce each other. Violence reduces agricultural production by driving farmers from their land and disrupting markets. Reduced production and disrupted supply raise food prices and deepen poverty. Poverty and hunger enlarge the pool of people vulnerable to recruitment, exploitation and crime. And recruitment sustains the violence. A response that addresses only the violent end of this circle will find it replenishing itself. A response that strengthens production and livelihoods at scale can weaken it at its economic base, provided it is designed for insecure settings.

8. Why women matter to stability

8. Pourquoi les femmes comptent pour la stabilité

If livelihoods matter to security, why concentrate on women? Four lines of evidence answer the question.

The household channel. As Paper No. 1 sets out in detail, income controlled by women is spent disproportionately on food, health and children's education. A programme that raises women's earnings therefore reduces household food insecurity and keeps children in school more effectively than one that raises income in general. Children who are fed and in school are less exposed to recruitment and exploitation, and the economic stability of households is itself a foundation of the stability of communities.

The influence channel. Women hold significant influence over the choices of young people in their households and communities, including sons who may be targets of recruitment by armed groups or criminal networks. A mother with an independent income and respected economic standing has greater capacity to shape those choices, to offer alternatives within the household enterprise, and to resist pressures that draw young people into violence.

The societal channel. Research across countries has found that the status of women is associated with the peacefulness of states. Mary Caprioli found that higher levels of gender inequality predicted a greater likelihood of internal conflict. Valerie Hudson and colleagues, in Sex and World Peace, assembled extensive cross-national data showing that the physical security of women is a strong predictor of the peacefulness of states. These are associations rather than proof of causation, and they should be read with care, but they are consistent across studies and measures.

The peacebuilding channel. The United Nations Security Council, in Resolution 1325 of 2000, recognised the role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflict and in peacebuilding, and called for their full and equal participation. Subsequent resolutions built the agenda on women, peace and security, and Nigeria has adopted national action plans to implement it. Research has supported the agenda's premise: Jana Krause, Werner Krause and Piia Bränfors found that peace agreements signed by women delegates were associated with more durable peace and with higher rates of implementation.

Table 6. Channels through which women's economic participation contributes to stability

Tableau 6. Voies par lesquelles la participation économique des femmes contribue à la stabilité

A caution. None of this means that women are inherently peaceful or that men are inherently violent. Women have participated in violence, including as combatants and, in Nigeria, as people coerced into it; and women and girls have been among the principal victims of the conflicts in the north, from the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 to the many attacks on rural communities. The argument is not about character. It is that societies and households in which women participate fully, economically and politically, tend to be more resilient and more stable, and that the security dividend of livelihood programmes is likely to be larger when women control the income they generate.

9. Non-kinetic security and the role of the police

9. La sécurité non cinétique et le rôle de la police

The involvement of the Inspector-General of Police and of the Police Officers' Wives Association in the campaign raises a question that deserves careful treatment: what role can a police institution and its families play in a non-kinetic approach to security, and what does the evidence say about such approaches?

The evidence on community policing. Community policing, which seeks to build trust and cooperation between the police and the public, has been widely promoted, including in Nigeria. The evidence on its effects is sobering. A coordinated set of randomised studies in six countries of the Global South, reported by Graeme Blair and colleagues in Science in 2021, found that standard community policing interventions did not, on average, build citizen trust in the police or reduce crime. The authors attributed this partly to the structural constraints under which the police operated and to the limited depth of the interventions. The lesson is not that trust cannot be built, but that it is not built by labels or meetings alone.

Trust through visible service. If trust follows experience, then institutions that are seen to deliver tangible benefits to communities may build it more effectively than those that only promise to listen. The Police Officers' Wives Association has a presence in barracks and communities across the federation, and its members are connected both to the police institution and to the population it serves. When they act as mobilisers of economic opportunity for women, they offer communities an experience of the police family as a partner in welfare. That is a plausible, though as yet unevaluated, route to trust, and it should be studied as the campaign proceeds.

Household stability within the police. The campaign also addresses a constituency within the security services themselves. The economic security of police households affects morale, integrity and the pressures to which officers are exposed. Programmes that strengthen the livelihoods of police families contribute, in this respect, to the institutional health of the police.

Limits. Non-kinetic approaches complement but do not replace the protection of citizens where violence is active. In areas of insurgency or organised banditry, the safety of programme participants depends on effective security provision. The campaign's contribution is to the conditions of security over time, not to the immediate defeat of armed groups.

10. A theory of change for the Young Women in Agriculture Programme

10. Une théorie du changement pour le programme YWA

The evidence reviewed so far can be assembled into an explicit theory of change: a statement of how the programme's activities are expected to produce security outcomes, through which intermediate results, and under which assumptions. Making it explicit allows each link to be tested.

Table 7. Theory of change from enterprise to security

Tableau 7. Théorie du changement, de l'entreprise à la sécurité

Two features of this theory of change deserve emphasis. First, the security outcomes come late in the chain and depend on the earlier links holding. A programme that fails to deliver predictable income will not deliver a security dividend, however well it is intended. Second, several assumptions concern fairness, protection and governance rather than agriculture. The security dividend depends on how the programme is run as much as on what it produces.

11. Conditions for a security dividend

11. Conditions d'un dividende de sécurité

The global evidence and the Nigerian context together suggest eight conditions under which the programme is most likely to deliver a measurable security dividend.

Condition 1: Reach the places of greatest risk. The allocation of two million women to each geopolitical zone secures national equity. Within zones, priority should be given to Local Government Areas affected by conflict, displacement and acute food insecurity, as identified by the Cadre Harmonisé and security assessments, where the marginal benefit of new livelihoods is greatest.

Condition 2: Choose enterprises suited to insecure settings. Hydroponic production can be established close to homes, in urban settlements and in camps for displaced people, where access to farmland is unsafe. Kenaf, a hardy crop with an assured buyer, offers income in rural areas where conventional markets have been disrupted. The balance between the two should reflect local security conditions.

Condition 3: Make income predictable and lasting. The Liberian evidence suggests that the expectation of future lawful income deters recruitment. Off-take agreements concluded before planting, and the assurance of continued participation across cycles, serve this purpose directly. Interruptions in payment would undermine it.

Condition 4: Extend the benefit to young men. The programme is focused on young women, but recruitment into armed groups and crime falls heavily on young men. The security dividend depends partly on their choices. Household income, opportunities in processing, transport and logistics, and the indirect employment generated by kenaf clusters extend the benefit beyond enrolled women. These channels should be deliberately developed and measured.

Condition 5: Allocate fairly and transparently. Grievance is a mechanism of conflict. Selection criteria should be published, allocation should be equitable across communities and groups, and community leaders should be involved, so that the programme does not create new perceptions of exclusion.

Condition 6: Protect participants and resources. Women who gain income and visibility in insecure areas may face extortion, violence or levies by armed groups. Safeguarding protocols, secure digital payment channels, discretion in the publicity of individual participants and coordination with community leaders and the police are essential.

Condition 7: Govern the money. Ring-fenced accounts, milestone-based disbursement and direct payment to producers protect integrity and reduce the risk that resources are captured by elites or armed groups, which would turn the programme from a source of stability into a prize.

Condition 8: Measure security outcomes. The programme should track not only income and production but food security, using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale that underlies Sustainable Development Goal indicator 2.1.2 and simpler household measures such as the reduced Coping Strategies Index; school attendance; perceptions of safety and trust; and, where feasible, data on local incidents of violence from sources such as the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. Only through measurement can the security dividend be demonstrated rather than asserted.

12. Risks and the principle of doing no harm

12. Risques et principe consistant à ne pas nuire

Honesty about risk strengthens rather than weakens the argument. Mary Anderson's work on the principle of doing no harm showed that assistance in conflict settings is never neutral: it affects relations between groups, the resources available to armed actors and the legitimacy of institutions. Five risks are particularly relevant.

• Capture and diversion. Resources entering fragile areas may be captured by local elites or taxed by armed groups. Direct payment and fiduciary controls mitigate this risk.
• Sabotage. As the Philippine evidence shows, programmes that strengthen the standing of the state in contested areas may provoke attacks. Community ownership, discretion and coordination with security agencies reduce exposure.
• New grievances. Selection perceived as unfair can create tension between communities or between those enrolled and those not yet enrolled. Transparent criteria and phased, publicised expansion address this.
• Exposure of participants. Visible economic success can make women targets. Safeguarding and secure payment systems are part of programme design, not afterthoughts.
• Overpromising. Livelihood programmes cannot end insurgencies driven by ideology, defeat organised criminal networks or resolve long-standing disputes over land. Claims about security effects should be stated with the precision the evidence allows.

13. Evaluation design and research agenda

13. Conception de l'évaluation et programme de recherche

A programme of this scale cannot enrol twelve million women at once. Its staggered expansion across zones, states and Local Government Areas creates a natural opportunity for rigorous evaluation. Where enrolment is phased, communities that will join later can serve as comparisons for those that join earlier, in what evaluators call a stepped-wedge or phased-rollout design. Combined with baseline and follow-up surveys, this design allows the programme to estimate its effects on income, food security, schooling, empowerment and, with appropriate data, on perceptions of safety and incidents of violence.

Four questions deserve priority. First, does the programme reduce household food insecurity, as measured by the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, compared with communities not yet enrolled? Second, does it reduce the vulnerability of young people in participating households to recruitment and crime, and through which channels? Third, are effects larger in areas affected by conflict and displacement, as the theory of change predicts, or are they constrained there by insecurity? Fourth, does the involvement of the police family change community trust in the police? UNESCO REF invites research partners to examine these questions with the programme and commits to publishing the findings, whatever they show.

14. Conclusion

14. Conclusion

The proposition advanced by the Inspector-General of Police at the National Flag-Off, that food security is national security, is well supported by theory and evidence when it is stated precisely. Food insecurity and shocks to agricultural income raise the risk of unrest and conflict, especially where political exclusion and weak institutions are already present. Secure and predictable livelihoods raise the cost of participation in violence and reduce the grievances on which it feeds. Women's economic participation strengthens households, influences the choices of the young and is associated with more peaceful societies. And Nigeria's simultaneous food and security crises reinforce each other in a circle that can be weakened at its economic base.

The evidence is equally clear that a security dividend is not automatic. Livelihood programmes have reduced violence where they delivered reliable income at scale, and they have provoked violence where they became contested prizes or exposed participants to attack. The difference lies in design and governance. A programme that reaches the places of greatest risk, chooses enterprises suited to them, makes income predictable, extends its benefits to young men, allocates fairly, protects participants, governs its money and measures its effects has a credible claim to contribute to national security.

The Young Women in Agriculture Programme is designed to meet those conditions. If it does, it will show in evidence what was declared in Abuja on 4 March 2025: that a well-fed nation is a safer nation, and that the women who feed it are among the guardians of its peace.

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Cite as: UNESCO REF (2026). Food security as national security: women's agricultural enterprise and the non-kinetic foundations of stability in Nigeria. YWA Campaign Papers, No. 2. Abuja: UNESCO REF. This paper is a structured review of published research and official data. Page ranges should be confirmed against the original publications before formal citation.