The REF Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2026), pp. 1–38. Research article.

The 12 Million Mandate: Sovereign Institutional Multiplicity, SDG Alignment and the Political Economy of Women’s Agricultural Empowerment in Nigeria

Le mandat des 12 millions : multiplicité institutionnelle souveraine, alignement sur les ODD et économie politique de l'autonomisation agricole des femmes au Nigeria

Prince Abdulsalami Ladigbolu-Oranmiyan¹ and Elizabeth Egbetokun²

¹ UNESCO REF Research Unit, Read and Earn Federation for UNESCO, Abuja, Federal Republic of Nigeria

² Police Officers Wives Association (POWA) National Office, Abuja, Federal Republic of Nigeria

Correspondence: research@unescoref.org

Received: June 2026
Published: 12 June 2026
Published: 2026
DOI: 10.67943/refreview.2026.001
Licence: CC BY 4.0

Abstract

Résumé analytique

Nigeria has never lacked programmes for women in agriculture. From the Better Life Programme for Rural Women in 1987 to the Growth Enhancement Support Scheme and the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, successive interventions have been designed, funded and launched, yet the gender gap has proved remarkably durable: women manage only 21 per cent of farm plots, produce 30 per cent less per hectare than men, and the forgone output costs the economy an estimated US$2.3 billion a year. This article argues that the persistence of the gap is an institutional problem rather than a programmatic one. The constraints on women’s farming are held in place by four sources of authority at once: the constitutional state, customary institutions, international development mandates and organised civil society. Programmes that engage one or two of these leave the remaining constraints intact. We introduce sovereign institutional multiplicity (SIM) to describe a programme architecture that formally activates all four, and we specify observable criteria that separate formal activation from symbolic participation. The concept is developed through an institutional inception study of the UNESCO REF Young Women in Agriculture (YWA) programme, launched in Abuja in June 2023 under the Strategic Intervention Programme ALPHA (SIP-ALPHA) and taken to national scale at the flag-off of its mobilisation campaign on 4 March 2025, with a target of twelve million women. The study draws on programme documents, the proceedings of the national flag-off, the records of community mobilisation in pilot Local Government Areas and the independent public record of the programme from 2023 to 2025. The design fully meets the activation criteria in the civil society register and partly meets them in the constitutional, customary and international registers, where federal-state cost-sharing protocols, written land-access protocols and a formal multilateral or continental instrument remain to be concluded. The article closes with five testable propositions and a five-component delivery framework for replication under the CAADP 2026–2035 agenda.

Keywords: women in agriculture; institutional design; legal pluralism; traditional authority; polycentric governance; feminist institutionalism; hydroponics; kenaf; SIP-ALPHA; NEPAD_EY; SDG 2; SDG 5; CAADP; Nigeria

1Introduction

Introduction

Few countries have tried as often as Nigeria to raise the fortunes of women who farm. The Better Life Programme for Rural Women, launched in 1987, made rural women a national political priority. The Women in Agriculture units established within the state Agricultural Development Programmes from 1988 gave them a dedicated channel of extension. The Growth Enhancement Support Scheme of 2012 promised to put subsidised inputs directly into farmers’ hands, and the Central Bank’s Anchor Borrowers’ Programme of 2015 tied credit to production. Each had genuine achievements. None closed the gap.

The most recent national evidence is unambiguous. Women are 21 per cent of Nigeria’s primary plot managers, falling to 9 per cent in the North. Those who do manage plots produce 30 per cent less per hectare than men, 35 per cent less in the North and 25 per cent less in the South. A quarter of women plot managers use any fertiliser, against nearly half of men. The forgone earnings amount to 0.6 per cent of GDP, about US$2.3 billion a year, and closing the gap could raise annual output by up to 2 per cent of GDP once multiplier effects are counted (World Bank, 2022, 2023).

Why has a problem so well documented, and so often addressed, proved so resistant? The usual answers are programmatic: inputs arrived late, credit was captured by better-connected farmers, extension officers were too few. These answers are true but incomplete. They explain why particular programmes underperformed, not why the gap has outlived every programme. This article offers an institutional answer. The constraints on women’s farming in Nigeria are not held in place by any single authority. They are sustained at once by the constitutional state, which controls budgets and statutory land law; by customary institutions, which govern the allocation and inheritance of most rural land in practice; by international development mandates, which shape financing and accountability; and by the organised bodies that represent, or fail to represent, women themselves. A programme that engages only one or two of these sources of authority can change outcomes inside its own reach, but it leaves the constraints held by the others undisturbed. When the programme ends, the gap returns.

The article makes three contributions. First, it re-measures the problem, correcting statistics that have long been repeated in policy documents without support and showing that the more reliable evidence strengthens rather than weakens the institutional argument. Second, it introduces the concept of sovereign institutional multiplicity (SIM), a programme architecture that formally activates all four sources of authority, and it defines observable criteria that distinguish formal activation from the symbolic presence of stakeholders at a launch. Third, it applies the concept to the design of the UNESCO REF Young Women in Agriculture (YWA) programme, launched in June 2023 and flagged off nationally on 4 March 2025 with a mobilisation target of twelve million women, and derives from that analysis five propositions that later evaluations can test and a delivery framework that other states can adopt.

We are explicit about what this article is not. It is an institutional inception study. It examines the design of a programme at launch and does not report its outcomes, which cannot yet be known. Both authors hold roles in the programme, a relationship we disclose in full and address in the research design.

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.

The Nigerian finding is consistent with a long line of evidence on the household as a site of unequal returns. Studying plots within the same households in Burkina Faso, Udry (1996) found that plots controlled by women were farmed less intensively than comparable plots controlled by men in the same household and planted with the same crop, and estimated that reallocating factors of production across plots could raise household output by about six per cent. The household, on this evidence, does not pool resources as a single efficient unit. The rules that determine who controls which plot, and on what terms, shape output directly.

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.

The global evidence on what is forgone is now precise. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that closing the gender gap in farm productivity and the wage gap in agrifood-system employment would raise global gross domestic product by about 1 per cent, nearly US$1 trillion, and reduce the number of food-insecure people in the world by about 45 million (FAO, 2023). Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, carries a large share of that forgone value. On 13 July 2023 the Federal Government declared a state of emergency on food security, an acknowledgement from the highest office that existing frameworks were inadequate to the scale of the problem.

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.

2.5 Four decades of policy, 1987 to 2025

Quatre décennies de politiques, 1987 à 2025

The persistence of the gap is all the more striking because the policy record is long and consistent in intention. The principal national instruments are set out below in order of adoption.

1987. The Better Life Programme for Rural Women, launched under the leadership of Maryam Babangida, made rural women a subject of national policy. The centre that hosted the national flag-off of the YWA campaign in 2025 bears her name.
1988. Women in Agriculture units were established within the state Agricultural Development Programmes, creating a dedicated channel of extension for women farmers.
2012. The Growth Enhancement Support Scheme, under the Agricultural Transformation Agenda, distributed subsidised inputs to registered farmers through an electronic voucher system.
2015. The Central Bank of Nigeria launched the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme in November 2015, linking credit for smallholders to the delivery of produce to processors.
2022. The National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy, 2022–2027, set the federal framework for technology adoption in agriculture, within which the federal partnership for the YWA programme was announced in December 2025.
2023. On 13 July 2023 the Federal Government declared a state of emergency on food security.

Each instrument was designed and delivered principally through the constitutional register: federal ministries, state programmes and the central bank. None formally activated customary authority over land or assigned defined powers to organised associations of women. The argument of this article is that this common feature, rather than any defect peculiar to a single programme, explains their shared inability to close the gap.

2.6 Entitlement, productivity and the value of closing the gap

Droits d'accès, productivité et valeur de la réduction de l'écart

Two bodies of evidence establish what is at stake. The first concerns hunger. Sen (1981) showed that famine and chronic hunger arise less from an absolute shortage of food than from the collapse of people’s command over it, their entitlements, through falling income or rising prices. Nigeria’s experience of 2023 and 2024, when food inflation reached a recorded high of 40.87 per cent in June 2024 (NBS, 2024), is a case of entitlement failure in this sense. A programme that raises the income of women producers addresses hunger at the point Sen identified.

The second concerns productivity. The Food and Agriculture Organization 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, raising total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 per cent and reducing the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 per cent (FAO, 2011). The Nigerian evidence reviewed in Section 2.1 adds a qualification of central importance to this article: in the North, a substantial part of the gap survives the equalisation of resources (Oseni et al., 2014). Resources are necessary; the institutions that govern their use are decisive.

3Theoretical foundations

Fondements théoriques

Four bodies of scholarship each explain part of the problem. None, on its own, explains why programmes fail to close it.

3.1 Legal pluralism and land

Pluralisme juridique et foncier

In Nigeria, as across much of Africa, more than one legal order governs the same land. Griffiths (1986) defined legal pluralism as the presence in a social field of more than one source of binding rules, and Nigeria is a textbook case. The Land Use Act of 1978 vests land in each state governor in trust for the people and was intended to create a uniform statutory regime. In practice, customary tenure continues to govern the allocation, use and inheritance of most rural land, and customary rules commonly vest control in male household heads and lineage elders (Aluko & Amidu, 2006). A woman may hold a statutory right that her community does not recognise. A programme that works only through statute will find that its gains stop at the boundary of the family farm.

The economic consequences of insecure tenure are well established. In southern Ghana, Goldstein and Udry (2008) showed that individuals with less secure rights over land, including women and those without positions of local political authority, fallowed their plots for shorter periods, reducing long-term productivity, because a plot left fallow risked being reallocated. Tenure security, in other words, is produced by standing within customary institutions, not only by statute. Conversely, when land rights are formally recognised, investment follows: evaluating the pilot of land tenure regularisation in Rwanda, Ali, Deininger and Goldstein (2014) found increased investment in soil conservation, with markedly stronger effects for female-headed households. Together these studies imply that a programme seeking to raise women’s productivity must secure their tenure through the authorities that actually allocate land.

3.2 Polycentric governance

Gouvernance polycentrique

Ostrom (2010) showed that complex resource systems are often governed most effectively not by a single centre but by many centres of decision-making, each with real authority, that coordinate through rules they recognise in common. Her work explains why top-down programmes frequently fail where local institutions hold effective authority. It does not, however, specify how a development programme should deliberately assemble such a configuration when the relevant centres derive their authority from different and sometimes competing sources.

3.3 Traditional authority as a development broker

L'autorité traditionnelle comme intermédiaire du développement

A growing literature treats traditional rulers not as relics but as active participants in development. Baldwin (2016) shows that in democratic Africa, chiefs often strengthen rather than weaken the delivery of public goods, because they hold durable local legitimacy and can coordinate communities in ways that elected officials cannot. The same authority, however, can entrench existing hierarchies, including hierarchies of gender. Engaging traditional rulers is therefore necessary but not sufficient: the terms of engagement determine whether their authority is used to open access or to defend the status quo.

3.4 Feminist institutionalism and empowerment

Institutionnalisme féministe et autonomisation

Feminist institutionalism directs attention to the formal and informal rules that structure women’s opportunities, and warns that consultation without decision-making power reproduces the tokenism that has characterised much gender mainstreaming (Mackay et al., 2010). Kabeer (1999) defines empowerment as the expansion of the ability to make strategic life choices, through resources, agency and achievements together, and Agarwal (1994) established independent land rights as central to women’s economic security. Together these works show that what matters is not whether women’s organisations are present, but whether they hold defined powers.

3.5 The gap these literatures leave

La lacune laissée par ces travaux

Each literature isolates one register of authority. Legal pluralism explains the collision of statute and custom; polycentric governance explains why multiple centres can outperform one; the literature on chiefs explains the conditional value of customary authority; feminist institutionalism explains why women’s formal power matters. What is missing is a concept that treats these registers together, as a single design problem for a programme, and that tells a designer, a funder or an evaluator when the problem has been addressed. Section 4 proposes such a concept.

4Sovereign institutional multiplicity

La multiplicité institutionnelle souveraine

4.1 Definition

Définition

We define sovereign institutional multiplicity as a programme configuration in which institutional actors deriving authority from four distinct sources are each formally activated within a single governance architecture. The four sources, which we call registers, are set out in Table 1. We call them sovereign not because each is a state, but because each is the final source of authority over a part of the problem: no other register can override it within its own domain.

Table 1. The four registers of sovereign institutional multiplicity

Register	Source of authority	Constraints it governs
Constitutional	The federal and state governments, through executive, legislative and budgetary power	Budget allocation, statutory land law, extension systems, public credit schemes
Customary	Traditional rulers and lineage institutions	Allocation and inheritance of rural land, community norms, social sanction
International	Multilateral and continental frameworks: the United Nations 2030 Agenda, within whose framework UNESCO REF operates as a body constituted through the National Commission for UNESCO, Nigeria; and the African Union’s CAADP framework, with which the programme is aligned	Development finance, continental targets, accountability that outlasts electoral cycles
Civil society	Organised associations of women with recognised representative standing	Mobilisation, voice of beneficiaries, accountability of implementers to women

4.2 Activation, not attendance

Activation, et non simple présence

The concept would be empty if it were satisfied by a crowded launch ceremony. We therefore distinguish formal activation from presence. A register is formally activated only when four conditions hold: there is a written mandate or instrument that names the actor’s role; the role is specific, stating what the actor will decide or deliver; the actor has committed a resource or a decision, such as land, budget, personnel or a rule change; and there is a line of accountability through which failure to deliver can be identified. A register that meets some but not all conditions is partially activated. These criteria make the concept observable and its claims open to challenge.

4.3 How the concept differs

Ce qui distingue le concept

SIM differs from polycentric governance in two respects. It is deliberate rather than emergent, describing a configuration that a programme assembles; and it spans different kinds of sovereignty rather than different levels of one. It differs from the familiar multi-stakeholder partnership because it is defined by the sources of authority engaged rather than by the number of partners, and because it requires formal activation in every register. A partnership of fifty organisations drawn from a single register does not meet the definition; a partnership of four actors, one formally activated in each register, does.

5Research design

Méthodologie de la recherche

The study is a single, theory-building case study (Yin, 2018) of the YWA programme at the point of launch. The case was selected because it was designed explicitly to engage all four registers, which makes it suitable for developing a concept and for identifying the conditions under which full activation can be achieved.

Five sources of evidence were used. The first was the programme’s design and governance documents (UNESCO REF, 2026), including the instruments through which each partner accepted its role. The second was the proceedings of the national flag-off of the mobilisation campaign at the Maryam Babangida National Centre for Women Development, Abuja, on 4 March 2025, comprising the addresses and statements of the Minister of Women Affairs, the Inspector-General of Police, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Food Security, the Director-General of the Centre, the keynote address of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina J. Mohammed, delivered on her behalf, traditional institutions and POWA. The third was the record of community mobilisation in the pilot Local Government Areas during 2025 and 2026, including the remarks of prospective beneficiaries at mobilisation meetings. The fourth was the independent public record of the programme from 2023 to 2025, comprising the reports of the News Agency of Nigeria, Daily Trust, the Nigerian Tribune, The Guardian, ThisDay and Leadership, and the federal statements of December 2025. The fifth was published secondary data, drawn only from primary sources: the National Bureau of Statistics, the Cadre Harmonisé, the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

The launch proceedings and mobilisation records were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019). Programme documents were coded deductively against the four activation criteria in Section 4.2, register by register, and the resulting assessments were checked against the launch proceedings. The study was reviewed by the UNESCO REF Research Ethics Panel (reference UNESCO-REF-REP-2026-001), and remarks from mobilisation meetings are reported anonymously, with consent.

Both authors hold roles in the programme. This gives access to evidence that an outsider could not obtain, but it creates an obvious risk of favourable interpretation. Three safeguards were adopted: the activation criteria were fixed before the documents were coded; the analysis reports registers that are only partially activated, not only those that are complete; and the manuscript was handled by an independent editor under the journal’s conflict-managed procedure. Readers should nonetheless treat the findings as an inception-stage analysis by participants, to be tested by independent evaluation.

6The architecture of the YWA programme

L'architecture du programme YWA

The YWA programme was launched in Abuja in June 2023 under SIP-ALPHA, the Strategic Intervention Programme ALPHA of UNESCO REF, under the theme Enhancing the Economic Value of Nigerian Women Through the Agricultural Value Chain. Its twelve million mobilisation campaign was flagged off nationally on 4 March 2025 to mark International Women’s Day, with a distribution of two million women for each of the six geopolitical zones. The programme is organised in three phases: a pilot in twelve Local Government Areas spread across the six geopolitical zones; national scaling; and continental replication through NEPAD_EY, UNESCO REF’s own platform for synchronising the development of education and youth in Africa in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. The analysis below takes each register in turn and is summarised in Table 2.

6.1 Constitutional register

Registre constitutionnel

The programme is anchored in the federal executive, with the participation of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security and the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs. Executive anchoring matters because the gaps described in Section 2.4 arise from the interaction of several ministries and budget lines; only an authority above any one ministry can coordinate them. The federal commitment has since acquired financial form. On 9 December 2025 the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Food Security announced a federal partnership with UNESCO REF to empower 4.5 million Nigerians within the twelve million target, in two phases of three million and 1.5 million beneficiaries, with the Presidency brokering the financing required, and described the programme as “not just an agricultural intervention” but “a national security and empowerment strategy” (News Agency of Nigeria, 2025). The constitutional register is not yet complete, however. Nigeria’s federal structure places agricultural extension and much land administration with the states, and the protocols that will define cost sharing between federal and state governments have not yet been formalised.

6.2 Customary register

Registre coutumier

Traditional rulers from all six geopolitical zones are integrated as institutional co-sponsors, with commitments on community mobilisation and on facilitating women’s access to land. The significance of this register was put plainly at the national flag-off:

“When the government comes, people wait to see what happens. When the Oba or Emir speaks, people act.”Traditional ruler, North-Central zone, national flag-off proceedings, Abuja, 4 March 2025

The commitments on land are, at this stage, commitments of principle. The written protocols that will specify how land is identified, allocated and secured for women participants in each pilot area remain to be agreed. Until they are, this register is partially activated.

6.3 International register

Registre international

The international register is the least formalised of the four, and the analysis states its position precisely. Three elements are present. First, UNESCO REF was established in 2009 within the provisions of UNESCO, as authorised by the 13th Session of the UNESCO General Conference, Paris, 1964, and is constituted through the National Commission for UNESCO, Nigeria. This gives the programme a written basis within the framework of UNESCO and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Second, the keynote address of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina J. Mohammed, delivered on her behalf at the national flag-off of 4 March 2025, situated the campaign within Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, 3 and 8. Third, the programme is designated for continental replication through NEPAD_EY, UNESCO REF’s own platform for synchronising the development of education and youth in Africa in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.

The design is aligned with the African Union’s agricultural framework. The Kampala Declaration and the CAADP Strategy and Action Plan for 2026–2035, adopted at the African Union’s Extraordinary Summit in Kampala in January 2025, make gender transformation a core commitment of African agricultural policy for the coming decade (African Union, 2025). Alignment, however, is not activation. No written instrument has yet been concluded with a multilateral or continental body that assigns the programme a defined role, commits a resource or establishes a line of accountability. Measured against the criteria of Section 4.2, the international register is therefore partially activated: the mandate and the role are specified, while the resource and the accountability remain pending. The distinction is material to the argument of this article, which holds that the durability of a programme across changes of government depends in part on precisely this register.

6.4 Civil society register

Registre de la société civile

The Police Officers Wives Association is the programme’s institutional co-partner, joined by the associations of the wives of officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Immigration Service and Road Safety Corps, among others. Their role is not consultative. They hold defined responsibilities for mobilising members as participants, for representing beneficiaries within the programme’s governance, and for reporting on delivery. Women at the mobilisation meetings identified this role as a reason to believe in the programme:

“We have POWA here. Whatever they promise us, POWA will make sure they do it.”Prospective beneficiary, community mobilisation meeting, South-South zone, 2026

Table 2. Activation status of the YWA programme by register, at launch

Register	Written mandate	Specific role	Resource or decision	Accountability	Status
Constitutional	Yes	Yes	Federal: yes. State cost sharing: pending	Yes	Partial
Customary	Yes	Yes	Mobilisation: yes. Land protocols: pending	Yes	Partial
International	Yes	Yes	Pending	Pending	Partial
Civil society	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Full

Assessed against the four criteria in Section 4.2, using programme documents, the proceedings of the national flag-off and the independent public record. In the international register, alignment with the 2030 Agenda and the CAADP framework is established; a written instrument committing resources and accountability with a multilateral or continental body is pending.

6.5 Enterprise design: soilless production and an industrial fibre crop

Conception des entreprises : production hors sol et culture de fibre industrielle

The architecture is matched by an enterprise design that addresses the constraints identified in Section 2. The first discipline is hydroponics, the cultivation of crops in nutrient solution without soil. Because hydroponic systems can be installed in a compound, on a rooftop or in an urban plot, they reduce dependence on the land holdings to which women’s access is most restricted, and they allow production close to the home in areas where distant fields are unsafe. The second is agro-kenaf enterprise development. Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus) is a fast-growing bast fibre crop with industrial uses in cordage, textiles, pulp, fibreboard and composites. It places women in a value chain with industrial demand rather than in crowded markets for staple food, and supports the domestic substitution of imported packaging and textile inputs.

The programme’s stated income model projects earnings of at least ₦400,000 per twelve-week cycle for participants in kenaf enterprise, a figure restated by the Presidency in December 2025 (News Agency of Nigeria, 2025). It is a projection, not an audited outcome, and is treated here as a design parameter to be tested. Pilot training in the hydroponic component began on 10 March 2025 with a United States institution, six days after the national flag-off (Daily Trust, 2025), and an urban agriculture programme for women was inaugurated in Lagos in December 2025 with the National Horticultural Research Institute and the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training among its partners (ThisDay, 2025).

6.6 The programme record, 2023 to 2025

Le dossier du programme, 2023 à 2025

The activation assessment rests on documents, but the programme also has a public record that allows its trajectory to be checked independently. Table 3 sets out the principal dated events.

Table 3. Principal dated events in the YWA programme record, 2023 to 2025

Date	Event	Register engaged
June 2023	Launch of the YWA Champions in Abuja under SIP-ALPHA, with the Secretary-General of the National Commission for UNESCO, Nigeria, present	International; civil society
13 July 2023	Federal declaration of a state of emergency on food security	Constitutional
September 2023	Engagement of the Ogun State Government; partnership with the House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora Affairs; mobilisation target of 100,000 women	Constitutional; civil society
March 2024	Sensitisation of the wives of senior police officers and POWA state chairpersons as programme focal persons in every command	Civil society
4 March 2025	National flag-off of the twelve million mobilisation campaign, Maryam Babangida National Centre for Women Development, Abuja	All four registers
10 March 2025	Start of pilot training in the hydroponic component	Civil society; international
July 2025	Inauguration of the National Soil to Security Campaign Team at POWA’s 61st anniversary, Lagos	Civil society
9 December 2025	Federal partnership for 4.5 million beneficiaries in two phases, announced by the Presidency	Constitutional
December 2025	Urban agriculture programme for women inaugurated in Lagos with the Presidency and the Lagos chapter of POWA	Constitutional; civil society

Sources: Daily Trust (2023, 2025); News Agency of Nigeria (2023, 2024, 2025); Leadership (2025); The Guardian (2025); ThisDay (2025); UNESCO REF (2026).

6.7 What participants saw

Ce que les participantes ont perçu

Across the mobilisation meetings, women returned to one theme: the programme seemed likely to last. They contrasted it with earlier schemes that had arrived with a single sponsor and departed with it. Explaining the difference, they named the combination of government, traditional and international authority, and the presence of an association they knew. In the terms of this article, they were describing activation across registers. Perceived permanence matters because a woman who expects a programme to disappear will not commit scarce land and labour to it.

7SDG alignment

Alignement sur les ODD

Because the constraints the programme addresses cut across sectors, its intended outcomes do too. Table 4 sets out the alignment of programme components with the Sustainable Development Goals and the indicators against which progress will be reported. Alignment here is a statement of design intent, not of results achieved.

Table 4. Alignment of YWA programme components with the Sustainable Development Goals

Goal	Programme component	Indicators to be reported
SDG 1	Agricultural income for women participants; access to finance through partner financial institutions	1.1.1 extreme poverty; 1.4.2 secure tenure rights to land
SDG 2	Inputs, extension and land security; climate-smart practice	2.3.2 income of small-scale producers by sex; 2.4.1 sustainable agriculture
SDG 5	Land documentation; formal governance roles for women’s associations	5.a.1 women’s ownership of agricultural land; 5.a.2 legal guarantees of land rights
SDG 8	Market linkage, value chain integration, digital financial inclusion through The August Project	8.3.1 informal employment; 8.10.2 access to financial accounts
SDG 10	Targeting of under-served rural communities	10.2.1 population below 50 per cent of median income
SDG 12	Post-harvest loss reduction; responsible input use	12.3.1 food loss index
SDG 13	Climate adaptation in training; resilient seed varieties	13.3.1 climate change education
SDG 17	Coordination across all four registers; continental synchronisation through NEPAD_EY	17.17.1 public-private and civil society partnerships

8Propositions and delivery framework

Propositions et cadre de mise en œuvre

8.1 Five testable propositions

Cinq propositions vérifiables

A concept earns its place if it makes claims that could prove wrong. We advance five, framed so that the programme’s own monitoring data and later independent evaluations can test them.

Programmes that formally activate all four registers will retain women participants for longer than programmes that activate fewer, holding resources constant.
Where the customary register is formally activated, women’s secured access to land will rise faster than where it is activated in principle only.
The gender productivity gap that persists after equal endowments, observed in the North by Oseni et al. (2014), will narrow more where the customary and civil society registers are both fully activated.
Programmes anchored in the international register will show greater continuity of funding and staffing across changes of government.
The perceived permanence of a programme, reported by participants, will predict their investment of land and labour in it.

8.2 A five-component delivery framework

Un cadre de mise en œuvre en cinq composantes

For governments and partners wishing to replicate the model under the CAADP 2026–2035 agenda, the analysis yields five components, each tied to the activation criteria.

Constitutional anchoring. Endorsement and accountability at the level of the head of government, with written federal-state protocols on cost sharing agreed before scaling.
Customary integration. Written commitments from traditional institutions on land identification, allocation and security for women, agreed before launch in each area.
International activation. A written instrument with a multilateral or continental body that assigns the programme a defined role, commits resources and establishes reporting aligned to the national CAADP compact and to the indicators of the CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035. For the YWA programme this instrument remains to be concluded; NEPAD_EY provides the platform through which it would be pursued.
Civil society institutionalisation. Defined powers for women’s associations in design, delivery and evaluation, with seats in governance rather than places in consultation.
Cross-register accountability. A monitoring framework that reports, for each register, both programme outputs and institutional change: budget lines created, land protocols signed, rules amended, powers exercised.

8.3 An evaluation design

Un dispositif d'évaluation

The propositions can be tested only if the evaluation is designed before scaling. Three features are proposed. First, identification: because the programme expands from twelve pilot Local Government Areas to national coverage, the order in which areas enter can be used to construct comparison groups, allowing a staggered difference-in-differences design in which later-entering areas serve as comparisons for earlier ones, subject to tests of parallel pre-programme trends. Second, measurement: women’s empowerment should be measured with the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, which captures decision-making over production, access to and control over resources, control over income, leadership and time use (Alkire et al., 2013), and plot-level productivity should be recorded in a form compatible with the General Household Survey Panel, so that programme data can be compared with the national evidence reviewed in Section 2.1. Third, institutional indicators: for each register, the evaluation should record the date and content of each written instrument, so that the timing of activation can be related to participant outcomes, as Proposition 1 requires.

To guard against selective reporting, the analysis plan, outcomes and comparison strategy should be registered in a public registry before the first follow-up data are collected, and the evaluation should be conducted by a team independent of the programme’s leadership. These requirements apply with particular force to a study whose authors hold programme roles, as the authors of this article do.

9Risks and limits

Risques et limites

The architecture described here carries risks that its designers must manage rather than assume away. Customary authority can be used to admit women to land or to confirm their exclusion, and the same rulers whose endorsement opens a community may protect the interests of those who already control its land. Formal land protocols, monitored through the civil society register, are the safeguard. Associations of officers’ wives have unusual reach and organisational capacity, but their members are not the poorest rural women, and a programme that mobilises through them must reach deliberately beyond their membership. Executive anchoring gives authority but also exposure: a programme closely associated with one administration may suffer when it changes, which is why the formalisation of the international register, still pending, matters. Alignment with continental and multilateral frameworks is a necessary first step but is not, on the criteria of this article, activation. And full activation is costly in time and negotiation. These costs are justified only if the propositions in Section 8 hold.

The study itself has limits. It examines one programme at launch. Its primary evidence was gathered by participants in that programme. It cannot yet observe outcomes; longitudinal data across the six geopolitical zones will not be available before 2028. The concept of sovereign institutional multiplicity is offered as a framework to be tested, and the propositions are stated so that the test can be failed.

10Conclusion

Conclusion

Nigeria’s gender gap in agriculture costs the country billions of dollars a year and contributes to hunger affecting tens of millions of its people. It has survived four decades of programmes not because those programmes lacked ideas or money, but because each engaged only part of the institutional system that holds the gap in place. The evidence that the gap persists in the North even when women have the same resources as men points to the same conclusion: what must change is not only what women receive, but the rules and authorities that govern what they can do with it.

Sovereign institutional multiplicity names the design that answers this problem, and the activation criteria make it possible to tell whether a programme has achieved it. The YWA programme has achieved it in one register, the civil society register, and has partly achieved it in the other three, with the remaining steps specified: federal-state cost-sharing protocols, written land protocols and a formal international instrument. Whether it reaches twelve million women is a question only implementation can answer. What this article establishes is a way of knowing, in advance and in public, whether the architecture needed to reach them is in place.

Declarations

Déclarations

Author contributions: P. A. Ladigbolu-Oranmiyan conceived the study, developed the theoretical framework and wrote the manuscript. E. Egbetokun contributed to data collection, the analysis of the civil society register and the revision of the manuscript. Both authors approved the final version.
Competing interests: P. A. Ladigbolu-Oranmiyan is President of UNESCO REF and National Co-ordinator of the Young Women in Agriculture programme. E. Egbetokun is National President of the Police Officers Wives Association and UNESCO REF National Advocate for the programme. The manuscript was handled by an independent editor under the journal’s conflict-managed procedure.
Funding: The study was supported by the UNESCO REF Research Unit, Abuja. No external funding was received.
Ethics approval: Reviewed by the UNESCO REF Research Ethics Panel, reference UNESCO-REF-REP-2026-001. Remarks from mobilisation meetings are reported anonymously, with consent.
Data availability: The recorded launch proceedings, mobilisation records and programme documents are held by the UNESCO REF Research Unit, Abuja, and are available to bona fide researchers on written request to research@unescoref.org, subject to the conditions of participant consent.

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How to cite this article

Ladigbolu-Oranmiyan, P. A., & Egbetokun, E. (2026). The 12 million mandate: Sovereign institutional multiplicity, SDG alignment and the political economy of women’s agricultural empowerment in Nigeria. The REF Review, 1(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.67943/refreview.2026.001

The REF Review

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The 12 Million Mandate: Sovereign Institutional Multiplicity, SDG Alignment and the Political Economy of Women’s Agricultural Empowerment in Nigeria

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