Getting to the last mile, by Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

The annual Gender And Inclusion Summit, convened by the Policy Innovation Center (PIC) took place September 8th-9th. The theme for this year was ‘From Agenda to Action: Making Innovations Count for the Last Mile’. I chaired the Economic Inclusion session, and these are my remarks. I congratulate Dr Osasuyi Dirisu, Executive Director of PIC and the organisation’s leadership, for another excellent convening.

I am delighted to be here for this year’s Gender and Inclusion Summit. As we will hear from many of the presentations at this Summit, Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of laudable policies, programmes, pilots or innovations for women’s economic opportunities and empowerment.The question we must ask ourselves is: Why have these interventions not sufficiently altered the underlying conditions that determine women’s economic power?Some recent comparative data makes this question difficult to avoid.In 2025, Nigeria ranked 124th of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, and we were 30th of 36 Sub-Saharan African economies assessed.On the 2024 SDG Gender Index, Nigeria ranked 127th of 139 countries, with a score of just 47.4%, and classified as “very poor’, and regionally, Nigeria ranked 26th of 36 countries. With this in mind,I would like to share five key points for us to consider, as we think together over the next two days.

•We need to ask why the needle is not moving

Despite decades of investment and programming, an uncomfortable question remains: Why does the gap between women’s and men’s economic empowerment continue to widen or at the very least remain stubbornly persistent?

Women continue toown businesses but struggle to scale them, produce food but earn less from agricultural value chains, participate in informal markets while remaining excluded from formal economic opportunities, carry disproportionate unpaid care responsibilities; andexperience lower access to finance and digital opportunities.The challenge therefore is not simply reaching more women but changing the systems that continue to produce unequal outcomes. 

TheConcept Note for this Summit highlights persistent disparities in productivity, financial inclusion, and access to productive resources, despite women’s central role in Nigeria’s economy. We know the statistics: the financing gap, productivity gap, digital divide, asset gap, the market-access gap. To address these gaps, we havehad gender policies, financial-inclusion programmes, agricultural interventions, entrepreneurship funds, digital-skills programmes, and donor investments for years. And, while our Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Policy is still in its infancy, we have always implemented WEE strategies at national and subnational levels. In addition to the WEE Policy, in July 2026, we added a new ”Nigeria Gender Profile and Roadmap to Equality 2030″, not forgettingour existing National Gender Policy. Despite these efforts, our comparative position remains troublingly low. So, the important question we should try to answer in this Forum is: what lies between intervention and impact? 

This Summit rightly focuses on innovation for inclusion. However, innovation must confront the systems that produce exclusion and we must ask the questions:Why do women still have less control over productive assets?Why do they remain underrepresented where economic decisions are made?Why do they continue to face barriers to finance, markets, and technology?Why is unpaid care work still treated as invisible?Why are discriminatory social norms still shaping women’s economic opportunities?

Unless we address these structural issues, we risk designing better programmes around fundamentally unequal systems. Innovation should not simply help women navigate inequality; it should help dismantle it.The World Bank’s 2026 Women, Business and the Law data offer a revealing answer: Nigeria scores 51.1% for its legal framework, 49.0% for supportive frameworks, but only 34.33% for enforcement perceptions. This means there is a progressive gap as we move from what exists on paper to women’s lived realities. That is precisely the agenda-to-action gap this Summit, and this High-Level Forum, should interrogate.

•Economic inclusion must address women’s personhood, not just women’s productivity.

We often approach women’s economic empowerment by asking: Does she have credit? Has she received training? Does she have a smartphone? Can she access a market? But before all these lies a more fundamental question: Does she have agency over her own life? Can she decide whether to work? Can she travel to a market? Can she own and control land? Can she retain the income she earns? Can she open and operate an account independently? Can she decide how her time is spent? Is she safe at home, at work, and in public spaces? Can she make decisions about her body and reproductive life? 

A woman cannot be economically empowered in the marketplace while being denied personhood everywhere else. Violence, unpaid care, restrictive social norms, unequal household power, lack of property rights, and limits on mobility are not peripheral “gender issues”; they are economic infrastructure. We cannot close an economic gender gap without addressing the social and power relations that continually recreate it.

Let’s consider, for example, Asabe, a woman farmer in a remote community. We may give Asabeimproved seedlings, access to credit, training in climate-smart agriculture, and perhaps even connect her to a market. On paper, we may count Asabeas “economically empowered.” But what happens if, on her way to or from her farm, Asabefaces the risk of kidnapping, sexual violence, or other forms of insecurity? What happens if the road to the market is unsafe, if she cannot leave her children because there is no childcare, if her husband batters her, or if the land she cultivates is not legally hers to control? Asabe’schallenge is no longer simply that she is a woman farmer. It is that her gender intersects with location, poverty, insecurity, weak infrastructure, care responsibilities, access to justice, and unequal control over assets. This is why we cannot separate women’s economic rights from their right to safety, dignity, mobility, bodily autonomy and, ultimately, their full personhood.Women cannot exercise economic agency where fear defines their daily lives.If we are serious about inclusion, then women’s safety must be understood as part of economic policy, not as a separate social issue.

•There is no generic “Nigerianwoman”. Innovation must become intersectional if it is truly going to reach the last mile.

The phrase ”last mile” can sometimes make exclusion sound merely geographical: as though the challenge is simply getting a product or programme from Abuja or Lagos into a rural community. But the last mile is also structural. Gender intersects with poverty, class, ethnicity, age, disability, geography, education, displacement, connectivity, marital status, and other conditions to determine who can actually use an opportunity once it arrives. Give 1,000 women the same digital financial product and they do not begin from the same starting line: one has a smartphone, literacy, identification, and control over her finances; another shares a phone with her husband; another lacks NIN registration; another has a disability that the platform was not designed to accommodate; another cannot travel without permission; another spends several hours each day on unpaid care. An innovation that reaches women statistically can still leave the most excluded women untouched. So, our measure of scale should not simply be how many women did we reach? but which women did we reach, which women did we miss, and what happened to the gap between them? 

•We need to stop treating women’s constraints one at a time: the problem is an ecosystem, so the solution must be multi-sectoral

A loan does little for a woman who cannot access land. Land does not guarantee prosperity without inputs and markets. A digital marketplace does not solve exclusion where women lack identity, connectivity, or digital literacy. Training does not create a viable enterprise where care burdens leave no time to utilize the knowledge. And technology will not overcome norms that prevent women from controlling the resulting income. The failure may therefore not be that individual interventions are ineffective, but that we keep solving interconnected problems in isolation. Economic empowerment should be designed around the entire pathway: from agency to identity to assets to skills to finance to production to markets to ownership to control of returns to growth and resilience. That requires government, educational institutions, financial institutions, technology companies, development partners, and civil society to stop measuring only their individual programme outputs and begin asking whether their interventions alone can change women’s economic trajectories, and then seek the relevant partnerships and collaborations that can minimise the gaps.

•Let us redefine innovation and success

Innovation is not only about digital platforms, Fintech, AI, and climate-smart agriculture. Innovation is also about changing policies, redesigning institutions, reforming markets, transforming social norms, and creating accountability.Sometimes the most powerful innovation is changing who has power, and who gets heard. We routinely celebrate the number of women trained, accounts opened, loans disbursed, farmers reached, platforms launched or women-owned businesses supported. Those are useful outputs, but they are not women’s economic empowerment. The questions should be: Did her income increase? Did productivity improve? Did she move into a higher-value segment of the value chain? Does she own productive assets? Did her enterprise survive and scale? Can she employ others? Does she control the income generated? Did her unpaid-care burden change? Did the gender gap narrow? And critically, which institution is accountable when it does not? 

Innovation should therefore come with gender-disaggregated and intersectional outcome measures, clear baselines, time-bound targets, and public accountability for results. Women themselves should also be at the table not merely as beneficiaries or research respondents, but as designers, investors, producers, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers.Ultimately, we must change what we call success, and move from access and participation to power, outcomes, and accountability.As we discuss innovation and economic opportunity for women in this Summit, letthis fundamental question guide us: What are the conditions that make it possible for a woman not only to earn an income, but to exercise agency, make choices, be safe, have a voice, and truly enjoy the economic power she has acquired?

The answer to this question is pertinent because wemust be deliberate and strategic in strengthening the architecture of women’s rights and agency. Economic programmes alone cannot transform women’s lives. We need stronger institutions, laws, implementation mechanisms, accountability systems, political representation, and women’s leadership. Innovation must include institutional and policy innovation, and the political will to make the gains sustainable.If we are serious about moving from agenda to action, then our ambition must be bigger than getting more women into the economy. We must build an economy and a society in which women have the rights, safety, resources, voice, and agency to determine the terms on which they participate. That is when economic empowerment becomes real power. That is when innovation truly reaches the last mile.

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a Gender Specialist, Leadership Coach, Policy Advocate and Writer. She is the Founder of Abovewhispers.com, an online community for women. She can be reached at BAF@abovewhispers.com

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