Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, has decried the systemic exclusion of women in Nigeria’s agricultural sector, saying they earn only 30% of output despite contributing 80% of total production.
Speaking in Abuja at the National Workshop on Agro-Value Chain Capacity Building, she noted that women make up 70% of the agricultural workforce but face barriers in land ownership and access to financing.
“Only 10% of us own farmland. And only a shocking 10% of us have access to agricultural financing,” she said.
TIMES OF NIGERIA gathered that the Tinubu-led administration, through the Women Agro Value Expansion Initiative (WAVE), aims to empower 10 million women across the value chain with toolkits, start-up support, and monitoring.
National Programme Manager Abdullah Mohammed explained that the initiative is designed to inject N10 trillion into women’s hands, translating into over N40 trillion annually.
He added that partnerships with private sector players like SMK Farms and Easy Sales Export will ensure sustainability, while regional start-up kits will enable beneficiaries to move from subsistence farming to large-scale agribusiness.
“Every beneficiary… will be carried along for the next five years until they become the billionaires that the government designed them to be,” Mohammed said.