When women prosper, the rural economies grow, contends GLORIA ANAJA AUDU
For generations, women have been central to Nigeria’s dairy economy, milking cattle at dawn, processing fresh milk into traditional products, selling in local markets, managing household nutrition, and reinvesting earnings into their families. Their contributions had never been in question. Yet many rural women have remained largely excluded from the formal financial systems that increasingly shape economic opportunity not for lack of ambition, but for lack of the financial tools to grow what they were already building. Nationally, an estimated 25 million Nigerian women remain formally unbanked, and 16 million rely exclusively on informal financial mechanisms. The gender gap in financial access has not been closing but widening, from roughly 10% in 2012 to 12% in 2020, with projections suggesting it will persist above 10% through 2027.
Financial inclusion matters not as an end in itself, but because it expands choice: a secure place to save and lets households plan beyond immediate needs. Formal services reduce dependence on costly or unreliable informal lending. Savings groups create room for collective investment; and financial records build credibility with banks, buyers and commercial partners. Together, these changes build economic agency, the ability to make decisions, manage resources, and pursue opportunity. Global evidence consistently links women’s control over financial resources to greater household investment in education, nutrition, healthcare and productive assets.
The Advancing Local Dairy Development in Nigeria (ALDDN) reflects this pattern. Rather than treating financial inclusion as a standalone activity, the programme embedded it in the daily life of farmer organizations. Self-help groups became more than savings mechanisms, they became spaces where women built financial confidence, exchanged knowledge, and developed relationships supporting both economic and social goals. A traditional ruler in Zaria, Kaduna State, put it simply during the programme’s closing research: for the first time, he said, women in his community were saving and accessing loans on their own account; his own wife no longer needed to come to him to fund the household kitchen. By programme close, more than 12,000 formal bank accounts had been opened and self-help groups had mobilized approximately ₦75 million in cumulative savings. Behind each figure sits a woman with greater financial security, a network of trust, and a household making decisions with more confidence.
As financial capability increased, the organizations themselves grew stronger: members participated more actively in decision-making, savings strengthened organizational sustainability, and leadership responsibilities broadened. Financial inclusion is often framed as a social intervention. The evidence here suggests it is equally an economic strategy, financially capable members strengthen collective action, and stronger collective action supports more efficient markets. “The most important outcome of financial inclusion is not a bank account. It is the confidence and capability to make economic decisions that shape the future.”
When women prosper, rural economies grow.
Development is often measured in indicators, accounts opened, savings accumulated, women in producer groups. These metrics matter, but the real significance lies in the decisions they make possible. A woman who saves consistently is better positioned to invest in her enterprise; a woman with access to financial services is better prepared to absorb a shock without selling livestock or cutting household consumption. Individually modest, these decisions accumulate into community-level change, which is why economists increasingly describe women’s economic participation as a multiplier rather than a single intervention.
Within ALDDN’s self-help groups and cooperatives, this played out through more than finance. Groups became spaces to exchange business ideas, discuss household investments, and solve shared problems, building social networks that proved as valuable as the savings themselves. Many groups organized their savings on two tracks at once: a credit and loan fund for productive investment, and a separate social welfare fund that members could draw on immediately, without paperwork or delay, in the event of illness, a birth, or a wedding. A self-help group leader in Rubwoi, Plateau State, described this second fund as the reason members stayed committed even in lean months, it meant the group could show up for a member in crisis the same day, something no bank in the area could do. As participation grew, many women also took on leadership: chairing meetings, managing savings records, coordinating activities, and representing members to processors and financial institutions. That shift matters because institutions perform better when leadership reflects the people they serve, broader participation strengthens accountability, and greater transparency builds trust.
This challenges a common framing: women’s economic participation is not a social add-on to agricultural development, but one of the mechanisms through which it succeeds. Stronger financial participation strengthens farmer organizations; stronger organizations make markets more reliable; more reliable markets give rural households the confidence to invest further a cycle that reinforces itself over time.
The Ripple Effect of Women’s Economic Agency:
Individual: increased savings, financial confidence, productive investment. Household: improved resilience, better financial planning, greater investment in wellbeing. Farmer organization: stronger leadership, better governance, increased participation. Market system: reliable supply, stronger institutions, inclusive growth.
Women’s economic agency generates value far beyond individual livelihoods — it strengthens the entire rural economy.
Agricultural development has traditionally centered on value chains, production, processing, market access, productivity. These remain fundamental, but experience increasingly shows technical interventions alone cannot deliver lasting transformation, because markets are ultimately shaped by people: the decisions producers make, the relationships they build, and the institutions through which they collaborate. This has driven a shift toward thinking about inclusive market systems, in which all actors are equipped to participate and benefit, a frame in which women’s economic agency is not a gender objective but a market systems imperative.
Within ALDDN, financial inclusion, self-help groups and cooperative participation were not run as isolated activities. As women became more financially capable, farmer organizations grew stronger; as organizations strengthened, relationships with processors became more reliable; as commercial relationships firmed up, confidence rose across the value chain. Investment at the household level generated improvements throughout the system.
This carries a practical design lesson. Gender interventions are too often built as parallel tracks, women’s training delivered separately, financial inclusion managed independently, leadership development treated as an add-on rather than core architecture. ALDDN’s experience argues for the opposite: a dairy value chain cannot become more competitive while half its economic actors remain constrained by limited access to finance, leadership, or commercial networks. Embedding women’s participation into the core design of a programme is not an inclusion requirement, it is a performance requirement, with the same logic applying well beyond dairy, to climate-smart agriculture, food security, and rural enterprise more broadly. “The question is no longer whether women should participate in agricultural markets. The question is whether agricultural markets can reach their full potential without women’s full economic participation.”
A credible account of this progress has to include where it fell short of target, and why. Bank account openings reached 12,299 against a goal of 15,750 — 78%. Formal credit linkage for women lagged further still: 1,706 women were connected to formal credit against a target of 3,150, or 54%. And only 7,045 female farmers had gone on to access two or more services from their cooperative, against a target of over 13,000 — roughly half, with distribution still ongoing at programme close.
These gaps are not evidence that the approach failed; they are evidence of where a six-year programme runs into constraints no single project can fully resolve on its own. Rural bank branch density in much of Northern Nigeria has not caught up to where these farmer groups actually operate, and while microfinance institutions are expanding into the area, they are doing so slowly. Roughly 40% of ALDDN’s cooperatives are less than two years old at programme close, the institutional muscle needed to negotiate formal credit or operate independently of programme support simply takes longer to build than a project cycle allows. And underneath both of those constraints sits a more basic one: documentation. Many women face structural barriers around national ID and bank verification number requirements, digital literacy, and social norms around independently managing money, barriers that sit upstream of any single group’s capability and require investment well beyond the dairy value chain.
The gender pattern shows up starkly in the underlying data: only 9% of women farmers in the programme had a mobile wallet or bank account, compared with 14% of men. In mixed-gender groups, women were disproportionately confined to secretarial roles even where they were active participants, while chairperson positions, the roles most likely to interface directly with a bank or a processor remained predominantly male. Financial inclusion, in other words, is not gender-neutral by default, even inside a programme explicitly designed to make it so.
None of this diminishes the ₦75 million in mobilized savings or the 12,299 accounts opened. If anything, it sharpens the more useful lesson underneath both numbers: informal, group-based savings outperformed target by a wide margin precisely because it required none of the documentation, infrastructure, or institutional maturity that formal credit and banking still demand. That is not a consolation prize. It is a sequencing lesson, build the savings habit and the trust it depends on first, and treat the transition to banks, digital payments and third-party credit as the next stage, not the first one.
Agricultural development has long been measured by what farmers produce, more milk, higher yields, greater market access. These outcomes remain important, but ALDDN’s experience suggests sustainable transformation is shaped by something deeper: who has the opportunity to participate fully in that growth. Women’s contribution to Northern Nigeria’s dairy economy was never in question. What changed through the programme was their ability to participate more fully in the economic systems surrounding it, through access to savings, financial services, organized producer groups, leadership, and markets.
As governments, private-sector actors, and development partners plan the next generation of agricultural investment, this deserves consideration alongside infrastructure, technology, and climate resilience. None of those investments reach full potential unless the people who sustain agricultural systems daily are equally equipped to participate in the opportunities they create. That means designing financial inclusion into the architecture of rural development rather than around its edges, with producer organizations that intentionally cultivate women’s leadership, and market systems that recognize women as entrepreneurs, producers, investors and leaders, not beneficiaries at the margins.
The story of ALDDN reaches beyond dairy. It suggests that investing in women’s economic agency does more than improve individual livelihoods, it strengthens the human systems that allow markets to function and local economies to adapt. Perhaps the more useful question for what comes next is not whether women should be included in agricultural development, but how much faster that development could move if their economic agency were treated as a core investment rather than a complementary one.
Audu is of ALDDN programme, implemented by Sahel Consulting Agriculture & Nutrition Limited in partnership with TechnoServe Nigeria with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation