Zamfara and Adamawa states scored the lowest among their peers nationally in an assessment centered on the state of women’s economic empowerment across the 36 states of the country.
The assessment evaluates the efforts and interventions for women’s economic empowerment across Nigeria’s 36 states using the National Women’s Economic Empowerment Policy and Action Plan five-pillar framework.
The report by BudgIT reveals that Adamawa scored 14.75 out of 24 points, while Zamfara scored 15.25. The two are far below Lagos State (19.75), which reported the highest across the country.
This simply implies that both states currently lack specific interventions focused on empowering women economically based on the five-pillar framework of Women in Agriculture, Women in Entrepreneurship, Women in the Traditional Labour Market, Women in Emerging Industries, and Women’s Education and Skills Acquisition.
According to the report, Adamawa had the lowest female employment rate in the country (55 percent), while Benue State recorded the highest proportion (80 percent).
Adamawa also had the lowest proportion of women in agriculture, scoring 1.75 out of four points respectively, while Sokoto State had the highest proportion (3.5 points).
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For women’s employment in the formal sector, only seven states scored between 29 percent and 30 percent; the remaining 29 states lagged in terms of female employment rates in the formal sector, according to BudgIT’s State of Women Empowerment report.
Room for improvement
The report recommended that both states must make provisions for women-focused interventions in order to increase their productivity and enhance their contribution to the state’s economy.
“Adamawa State government should provide active support for women agripreneurs by increasing dedicated agricultural funding through financial institutions. It is also important to form collaborations with financial institutions to offer female smallholders loans with lower interest rates,” the report stated.
“It would be beneficial to motivate banks to adopt more flexible collateral and registration criteria for women farmers in order to improve their access to financial resources,” the report noted.
The report also advised that the Zamfara State government should ensure the introduction of initiatives that scale women farmers from subsistence to commercial levels. It added that such initiatives should be properly integrated into the state budget, with annual increases to both allocations and beneficiaries.
