By Zainab Haruna

Globally, Nigeria is one of the countries projected to have the highest number of food-insecure people by 2050 (FAO). The country’s food insecurity challenge is multidimensional, precipitated by a potpourri of wide ranging challenges. These include low productivity, linked to gaps in the supply chain, post-harvest losses, and limited investment in smallholder farmers, as well as limited access to affordable food due to high food prices and reduced household purchasing power.

Other contributing factors include economic crises, climate shocks, conflict, and poor nutrition at the household level, which affect how food is utilized.

In 2025, more than 30 million people in the country are expected to face acute food and nutrition insecurity, a problem further exacerbated by increasing climate volatility across Nigeria, which perpetuates chronically low yields for farmers and deepens rural poverty. With such a wide dispersion of casualties, it is clear that Nigeria’s food insecurity has many layers but policy coherence and follow-through hold strong potential for turning the tide towards real progress. Sustainable, well-implemented policies could amplify gains in productivity, reduce losses, and make Nigeria’s food systems more resilient.

To realise the gains that effective policy implementation can unlock, we must urgently look to adopt more equitable approaches in our policy-crafting and program landscape. Why? Well, nearly half of Nigeria’s population is made up of women and girls, yet, women’s voices remain under-represented in the spaces where climate and agriculture policies are designed.

There is a real cost to exclusion in untapped potential and productivity, causing annual productivity loss. Nigeria’s food system remains heavily reliant on smallholder farmer-led agriculture, which produces over 80% of the country’s food and accounts for about 25% of the country’s GDP. However, women own less than 13% of farmland, and this under-representation in the system has profound implications for household and community resilience. According to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, because of the gender inequalities that exist in land ownership, access to extension services, and financing, women-led rural households experience comparably more food insecurity than households led by men. Beyond this, advancing desertification in the North and flooding in the South have entrenched resource-driven conflicts in the middle, putting further strain on already limited resources for women. Simply put, women’s representation in policy and programming is not just to be expected, it is urgent and imperative.

Nigeria’s agricultural policy framework is increasingly recognizing the importance of gender, and recent initiatives reflect this shift. The National Gender Policy in Agriculture, launched by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) in 2019 and currently under review, states the need to improve women’s access to extension services, land, credit, agricultural inputs, and markets, as a way to address long-standing gendered barriers to participation and decision-making in agriculture. Despite these intentions, implementation challenges persist. For example, a major concern is how the policy addresses women’s access to land. While the Land Use Act of 1978 seeks to promote equitable land distribution by vesting ownership in communities rather than individuals, in practice, customary laws dominate, and most community leadership structures are male-led. This creates a gap between policy goals and reality, contributing to persistently low rates of formal land ownership for women.
The conversation must shift to how we translate policy commitments into coordinated, sustained action . At One Acre Fund, the organization I work for, we are intentional about women-led impact. This ensures that women are not simply in the room, but are driving change by leveraging their diverse perspectives to unlock efficiencies for Nigeria’s climate and food system.

For Nigeria’s food systems to truly deliver on its promise, we must eliminate existing barriers that prevent women from reaching their full potential, and a few priorities stand out:

Meaningful Inclusion – FAO reports that centering women in the design of climate-smart policies, by ensuring improved access to land and inputs, can boost productivity by up to 30%. Women are custodians of knowledge in our communities. They must be brought in as stakeholders and partners early in the design and decision-making process to ensure that their diverse views and perspectives adequately inform policy and interventions. To avoid reducing this to a tick-box exercise, this work must have measurable targets that are tracked through both gender disaggregated data as well as transformational outcomes.

Linking Policy to Practice: Women’s productivity can be unlocked through improved access to critical training, quality inputs, and digital tools. Findings from our 2024 annual report showed that farmers practicing agroforestry generated more than $45 in new profits and assets, as soil health and crop yields improved. In 2025, our team provided fruit and timber tree seedlings to over 200,000 rural women farmers in Nigeria to drive the adoption of agroforestry and climate-smart agriculture practices on their farmlands. There is similar momentum at the national level. For example, the recent announcement of the Women in Green Economy Programme by the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs holds good promise as it is expected to position women at the centre of climate adaptation and mitigation efforts in Nigeria.

Mainstreaming Gender in Financing: Only 6% of women in Nigeria have access to formal credit facilities which exposes a huge funding gap that is critical for women-led action to thrive. Understanding the barriers that limit women’s access to formal financial support and designing financial instruments to bridge that gap is crucial to driving women’s leadership. The good news is, there are models of how to do this. The youth and women financing framework for climate-smart agriculture developed by the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF) and the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) is working to close the gap in women’s financing infrastructure. One Acre Fund’s flexible credit facility for women farmers which leverages a group liability model rather than collateral is also unlocking access to quality inputs for thousands of women. In Northern Nigeria, women’s cooperatives are another important hub that helps their members access financing, farm inputs, and support the dissemination of improved agronomy practices.

Nigeria’s food security crisis requires innovative, interconnected solutions— and if we don’t find meaningful ways to allow women to contribute, we’ll never achieve the nation’s full potential. By integrating these solutions into national policies, we can achieve significant progress in building climate-resilient, sustainable food systems.

The writer, Ms. Haruna, is a Tree Lead at One Acre Fund Nigeria