Nigeria’s $14.8bn Women Financing Gap Draws FG’s Attention 

Nigeria could unlock an estimated $14.8 billion in annual economic value by closing the financing gap confronting women, the Federal Government has said, urging financial institutions to develop products that reflect the realities of women borrowers.

The Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, said this yesterday at the Second National Gender Inclusion Conference, SheIsIncluded 2026, in Abuja.

She said the country’s challenge was not a shortage of ambition among women, but financial systems that were designed around conditions many women could not meet, particularly the requirement for collateral.

“The difficulty has been the design,” the minister said, adding that financial institutions should “design for the woman who exists rather than the borrower our models were built for.”

She proposed alternative-data credit scoring, guarantee-backed lending that recognises group liability and low-cost interoperable payment systems as possible ways of expanding access.

According to her, the World Bank-supported Nigeria for Women Project Scale-Up is already using women affinity groups to provide an alternative structure through which women save, lend to one another and expand their enterprises.

She disclosed that the programme had now reached 4.5 million women through 300,000 groups nationwide. In its first phase, more than 560,000 women were organised 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 ministry was prepared to open its programme pipelines to financial institutions willing to test products at scale, while urging state governments to co-finance and localise national programmes.

She also called on development partners to maintain a shared map of interventions to ensure resources reach underserved women.

Vice President Kashim Shettima, represented by Special Adviser on General Duties, Aliyu Modibbo Umar, said commitments to women’s empowerment must have clear ownership, measurable targets and deadlines.

Technical Adviser to the President on Economic and Financial Inclusion, Nurudeen Abubakar Zauro, said the economy could perform better when productive capital reached productive citizens, noting that greater equality in women’s participation could raise national output by as much as 23 percent.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission said women remained poorly represented in the capital market, with their access to capital for fundraising below five per cent.