• Salako urges stakeholders to dismantle barriers facing adolescents
•Gates foundation: Policies must produce improvements in people’s lives
Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
The federal government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have called for urgent action to close the gap between policies, innovations and actual services available to women, adolescents and other underserved Nigerians.
Speaking yesterday on the second day of the 2026 Gender and Inclusion Summit organised by Policy Innovation Centre (PIC) in Abuja, the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Iziaq Salako, said harmful gender norms continued to constrain the health, safety, education and economic opportunities of young Nigerians.
Salako, who delivered the keynote address at the event, said gender norms were unwritten societal rules and expectations governing how boys, girls, men and women should behave, relate with one another and access opportunities.
He warned that when such norms were rooted in unfair cultural practices and sentiments, they could reinforce discrimination and expose adolescents to violence, early pregnancy, mental health challenges and poor health outcomes.
According to him, transforming gender norms was therefore essential to creating an environment where every adolescent, regardless of sex, could be safe, healthy, empowered and able to realise their full potential.
He explained that such norms shaped how adolescents thought and behaved, as well as their access to healthcare and other opportunities.
“When such norms are based on crude sentiments and cultural fixations that are unfair, they can become harmful and limit adolescents’ choices thus reinforcing discrimination, and increasing exposure to violence, early pregnancy, mental health challenges, and poor health outcomes,” Salako added.
The minister said the federal government, under the administration of President Bola Tinubu, had introduced a number of measures aimed at improving adolescent health, including the institutionalisation of adolescent and school health programmes and the establishment of a dedicated budget line for adolescent health.
He also highlighted the expansion of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services, including access to family planning, sexually transmitted infection and HIV prevention, counselling and other services under the National Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy 2025 to 2030.
Salako said the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare had also integrated gender and adolescent health programming through a dedicated Gender, Adolescent School Health and Elderly Care Division in its Family Health Department.
He said the arrangement was designed to address gender-related barriers to healthcare, gender-based vulnerabilities and the differing health needs of adolescent girls and boys.
The minister further disclosed that the federal government’s national Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination campaign had reached more than 14 million adolescent girls aged between nine and 14 years nationwide, helping to protect them against future cervical cancer.
Salako also welcomed the findings of the Nigerian Survey on Gender Norms, Attitudes, Health and Wellbeing, describing the study as the first nationally representative data on the social and gender norms shaping health behaviours and outcomes among Nigerian adolescents.
He said the survey, which focused on adolescents aged 10 to 14, examined issues including child, early and forced marriage, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health, HPV vaccination and women’s economic empowerment.
“The evidence produced will be instrumental in informing policy formulation, programming, and advocacy across sectors including health, education, social protection, and economic empowerment,” he said.
Also speaking at the summit, the Deputy Director, Policy, Advocacy and Communications, Nigeria Country Office of the Gates Foundation, Ekenem Isichei, said the concept of the “last mile” should not be viewed merely in geographical terms, but in terms of the individual who ultimately needed to benefit from a policy or innovation.
Isichei said Africa was not short of policies, pilot programmes, technologies or commitments, but the more important question was whether those interventions were producing measurable improvements in people’s lives, particularly for women, young people, persons with disabilities and historically underserved communities.
He identified three critical shifts needed to turn ideas into impact: moving from commitments to execution, from access to agency and meaningful inclusion, and from successful pilots to systems capable of achieving sustainable scale.
“A policy announcement is not an outcome. A budget allocation is not a service,” he said, stressing that resources had to be released, commodities procured and distributed, frontline workers supported, facilities made ready and data effectively used before citizens could experience meaningful change.
He also cautioned against defining inclusion simply as providing access to technology or financial services, arguing that people must be able to use those services safely, affordably and meaningfully.
Isichei warned that as artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure and digital finance expanded, technology could reproduce existing inequalities if women, young people, persons with disabilities and underserved communities were excluded from the design process.