…launches four platforms to bridge gender finance gap, empower women-led businesses
By Johnbosco Agbakwuru
ABUJA – THE Vice President, Senator Kashim Shettima, on Wednesday, warned that Nigeria cannot reach a $1 trillion economy without women’s full economic participation, and has launched four strategic platforms to close the gender gap in financial inclusion and convert women’s economic potential into enterprises, jobs, and sustainable growth.
At the Second National Gender Inclusion Conference, #SheIsIncluded 2026, held at the presidential Villa, Abuja, the Vice President warned and outlined steps to shift women from financial exclusion into productive economic participation.
Speakers at the event including Senator Shettima; the Deputy Chief of Staff to the President Ibrahim Hadeija; the President’s Technical Adviser on Economic and Financial Inclusion, Dr. Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro; and Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development Imaan Sulaiman‑Ibrahim — presented the measures.
The conference with the theme: ” Designing for Delivery: From Financial Inclusion to Economic Transformation for the Nigerian Woman,” was organised by the Presidential Committee on Economic Inclusion in the Office of the Vice President.
The Vice President, who was represented by Dr. Aliyu Modibbo, warned that the administration’s $1 trillion economic goal will remain unattainable as long as women continue to face structural barriers to finance, markets, skills, and other opportunities.
According to him: ““We have set our sights on a one-trillion-dollar economy. But what kind of economy can we build if half of our people cannot participate fully in creating it?”
He said only 47 per cent of Nigerian women had formal financial accounts, compared with 58 per cent of men, describing the disparity as millions of women whose businesses lacked access to affordable capital and whose entrepreneurial potential remained largely untapped.
Shettima said evidence showed that Nigeria’s economic output could be significantly higher if women participated equally in the economy, insisting that investing in women was a growth strategy, not an act of charity.
“The question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in women; it is whether we can afford not to. Our answer is no!” he declared.
He said the Federal Government was moving from policy declarations to an “architecture of delivery” through initiatives designed to connect women and young people to skills, capital, markets and emerging economic opportunities.
Among the initiatives, he cited the National Income Activation Initiative and the Women in Energy Partnership with the World Bank, which he said was positioning women to participate as entrepreneurs, engineers, investors and leaders in the energy transition.
The Vice President cautioned, however, against measuring progress through national averages alone, saying aggregate figures could conceal the continued exclusion of women in rural communities.
He challenged policymakers and programme implementers to identify who was being reached, who remained excluded, what interventions were working and who should be held accountable when programmes failed.
“That is the difference between announcing inclusion and governing for it,” he said.
Hadeija at the conference, said the #SheIsIncluded initiative must move beyond an annual campaign and become an enduring national delivery framework for women’s economic prosperity.
He said the financial exclusion of women represented productive capacity that Nigeria could no longer afford to leave idle.
“These inequalities represent productive capacity our economy is yet to activate,” Hadeija said.
“Every viable woman-led enterprise that cannot obtain financing is investment lost, and every young woman with skills but no pathway to formal employment or entrepreneurial opportunity represents human capital underused.
“A nation aspiring for a one-trillion-dollar economy cannot afford to leave the productive capacity of half its population idle.”
Hadeija called for stronger coordination among federal institutions, state governments, financial institutions, the private sector, development partners and civil society to dismantle barriers to women’s access to finance, markets, technology, land, insurance, skills and connectivity.
He said the Federal Government would provide policy coherence, states would be expected to drive last-mile implementation, while financial institutions must redesign products around the realities of women.
“Our success will be measured not by the partnerships we announce, but by the problems those partnerships solve,” he said.
Zauro provided the clearest outline of the government’s new delivery strategy, announcing four platforms aimed at transforming financial inclusion into measurable economic participation.
He identified the platforms as digital trust infrastructure, data for accountability, blended finance and the National Income Activation Initiative.
Citing EFInA data, Zauro said Nigeria’s overall financial inclusion rate stood at 74 per cent of adults, but a nine-percentage-point gender gap persisted, while the disparity in formal access stood at 11 percentage points.
He said the challenge was no longer simply getting women to open bank accounts, but ensuring that access translated into affordable credit, productive finance, enterprise growth and increased income.
“A woman may hold an account and still lack affordable credit; receive a loan and lack a market; own a business and lack the records or collateral to scale it,” he said.
“Access is the beginning of inclusion; it is not its destination.”
Under the digital trust platform, Zauro said the government would strengthen the connection between gender-disaggregated identity and payment data to make women operating in the informal economy more visible to financial institutions.
“Once economic activity becomes visible, risk can be priced; once risk is priced, capital moves. That is how digital infrastructure becomes inclusion infrastructure,” he said.
The second platform, he said, would deploy gender-disaggregated data to track access, usage and the quality of financial services, enabling government to measure who was reached, what changed and whether interventions could be scaled.
On blended finance, Zauro said grants alone could not bridge the financing deficit facing women-led enterprises, while purely commercial lending often failed to reach underserved women at affordable rates.
He said public and concessional capital would therefore be deployed strategically to unlock larger pools of private investment.
The National Income Activation Initiative, he added, would integrate skills development, market access, digital tools, finance and business support across the six geopolitical zones.
“Skills without markets yield certificates without livelihoods, and credit without capability yields debt rather than growth,” he warned.
The Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Sulaiman-Ibrahim, said the $1 trillion ambition would remain incomplete unless women, particularly those operating in the informal sector, were fully integrated into the economic transformation agenda.
She identified poor last-mile delivery, unsuitable lending models, inadequate gender-disaggregated data, insecurity and unpaid care work as major barriers to women’s economic participation.
The minister disclosed that the Nigeria for Women Programme Scale-Up had expanded its women’s affinity-group model to 4.5 million women organised into 300,000 groups nationwide.
Under the first phase, she said, more than 560,000 women were mobilised into over 26,000 groups, saving more than N4.9 billion of their own resources and accessing about N15.6 billion in livelihood grants.
Sulaiman-Ibrahim said the savings and repayment records generated by the groups constituted a largely untapped credit history for millions of Nigerian women.
“What we have is, in substance, the credit file our institutions have long said Nigerian women do not possess. It exists today, it is verifiable, and it is available to any institution in this room willing to design a product around it,” she said.
She cited the Renewed Hope Women Agro-Value Expansion Programme, Women in Gas initiative and Women on Wheels as examples of programmes designed to transfer productive assets and create sustainable income pathways.
The minister urged banks, fintechs and other financial institutions to develop alternative credit-scoring models, guarantee-backed lending and affordable digital payment systems tailored to women at the grassroots.
She also called for stronger action against insecurity and gender-based violence, warning that women who were unsafe at home, in markets or online could not participate fully in economic activities.
On unpaid care work, she said childcare and other care infrastructure should be treated as productivity investments.
“A crèche at a market is not a welfare gesture; it is a productivity intervention,” she said.
She further disclosed that her ministry had developed, reviewed and validated 38 new national instruments within the past year, bringing its portfolio to 42 instruments covering gender mainstreaming, workplace equality, partner engagement and social protection.
She said the ministry had also produced a Country Gender Profile providing data on women and men across the economy, health, education, political participation, unpaid care, land, credit and social protection.
Shettima urged financial institutions, fintech companies, investors and development partners to treat gender-intentional finance as a viable market rather than concessionary charity.
“Women’s enterprises are demand; their savings are capital; their ideas are innovation,” he said.
He challenged state governments to measure success not merely by the number of women enrolled in programmes but by businesses expanded, jobs created and households whose resilience improved.
“Inclusion must be measured by changed lives, not attendance registers,” he said.
The Vice President also demanded stronger accountability, insisting that every commitment from the conference should have an owner, a measurable target and a deadline.
He said successful interventions should be tracked, reviewed and scaled through mechanisms including the proposed National Gender and Financial Inclusion Awards.
The second National Gender Inclusion Conference follows the inaugural “She Is Included” gathering held in January 2025, which focused on advancing women’s economic inclusion and empowerment.
Shettima said the Federal Government remained committed to Project #SheIsIncluded, the Aso Accord for Economic and Financial Inclusion and the broader goal of building a $1 trillion economy that works for all Nigerians.
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