Every year, International Women’s Day invites us to pause and celebrate women. The resilience. The brilliance. The quiet, extraordinary ability to thrive inside systems that were never designed with us in mind.
And we deserve every bit of that celebration.
But sometimes, celebration and growth cannot share the same room. Sometimes, the most loving thing we can do for ourselves, and for the women who will come after us, is to sit with an uncomfortable question:
Are we truly building the future we say we want for Nigerian women?
Because if we are honest, and I mean the kind of honest that does not perform well on a panel stage, the answer is not always a confident yes.
The Competition That Quietly Costs Us
Let us say plainly what many Nigerian women already sense but rarely say out loud: there is a particular kind of rivalry that moves through female spaces in this country, and it does not look like ambition. It looks like something else entirely.
It shows up in the subtle undermining of a colleague’s idea before she can take credit for it. In the discomfort when another woman gets the promotion, the speaking slot, the spotlight. In the unspoken calculation of whether her success somehow reduces your own.
This is not unique to Nigeria. But the shape it takes here, the way competition can quietly revolve around male attention, social proximity, and material validation rather than innovation or excellence — has a specific cost.
The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Nigeria 129th out of 146 countries on gender parity. Despite some board-level progress — women now hold approximately 25% of board seats at listed Nigerian companies according to IFC 2023 data, the highest on record — they remain almost entirely absent from the chair and CEO roles where strategy is actually set. And across sub-Saharan Africa, women hold under 30% of senior management roles despite making up nearly half of the labour force.
Those numbers do not shift on their own. They shift when the women who get in start deliberately making room.
Women hold under 30% of senior management roles in sub-Saharan Africa, despite making up nearly half the workforce. (ILO/ILOSTAT, 2022)
When rivalry is built around things that ultimately shrink collective power, women end up fighting battles that exhaust us. And the real work — building industries, shaping policy, mentoring the next generation, remains unfinished.
The Narrative We Challenge But Have Not Yet Replaced
There is a story that Nigerian women rightly push back against. The idea that a woman’s worth is tied to the man she is connected to. That her access, her status, her legitimacy come through him rather than through herself.
We challenge this narrative. We call it out at conferences and in comment sections. We post about it and pass the mic to women who agree.
But rejection is not replacement. And if the structures we are building with each other quietly mirror the same hierarchies we say we oppose, where access still flows through proximity, where women gatekeep rather than unlock, where solidarity is performed rather than practiced, then we have not actually moved.
We have just changed the aesthetic.
Nigeria has approximately 23 million female entrepreneurs, one of the highest concentrations of women-owned businesses in the world, according to the World Bank. Yet businesses led entirely by women received just 1.5% of all startup funding raised across Africa between 2019 and 2023, according to data tracked by the World Economic Forum and Africanews. In Nigeria specifically, only one in ten female-founded startups secured any funding at all during that period. The ideas exist. The ambition exists. What remains underdeveloped is the infrastructure of women supporting women at the level that actually changes outcomes.
Nigeria has ~23 million female entrepreneurs, yet all-female led startups received just 1.5% of total African startup funding between 2019–2023. Only 1 in 10 female-founded Nigerian startups secured any funding at all. (WEF, 2024)
Give to Gain: A Strategy, Not a Slogan
The phrase ‘give to gain’ sounds like the kind of thing that belongs on a motivational canvas print. But strip away the aesthetics and what it describes is actually a documented economic strategy.
The evidence on what actually moves the needle is clear, and more nuanced than the usual advice. Mentored employees are consistently five times more likely to be promoted than those without mentors.
But Catalyst’s landmark research adds a sharper edge: for women specifically, mentorship alone is not enough.
Their studies found women are often over-mentored and under-sponsored, meaning they receive plenty of guidance, but rarely have a senior colleague who uses their own political capital to actively advocate for them in the rooms that matter.
McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace data, tracked annually for nearly a decade, confirms the same pattern: women with sponsors, not just mentors, advance at significantly higher rates across industries.
When Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became Director-General of the World Trade Organization in 2021, she was the first African and the first woman to hold the role. That is history. But what is equally important, and far less discussed, is that her path was shaped by a network of women who recommended her, publicly backed her, and used their platforms to normalize the idea that she belonged there.
That is give to gain. Not charity. Not self-sacrifice. Strategic, intentional investment in people whose success expands the ecosystem for everyone.
Mentored employees are 5x more likely to be promoted, but Catalyst research shows women are over-mentored and under-sponsored. Sponsorship, not just mentorship, is what actually drives women’s advancement. (Catalyst / McKinsey WitW)
When women collaborate instead of compete destructively, opportunities multiply. When knowledge is shared instead of hoarded, the whole field moves faster. This is not idealism, it is what the data shows in sector after sector, from tech to finance to public service.
Paving the Way, Not Just Climbing the Ladder
There is a specific kind of success that changes nothing except the biography of the person who achieves it. They make it in. They do well. And the door closes behind them because it never occurred to them to hold it open, or because the culture they entered made holding it open feel dangerous.
Nigeria has produced extraordinary women. Amina Mohammed. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Mo Abudu.
Ibukun Awosika. These are not just individual achievers, they are reference points. They are proof that Nigerian women can lead on the world stage. But proof of possibility and structural change are two very different things.
Structural change happens when enough women in enough rooms ask not just ‘what is my next move?’ but ‘what systems am I leaving behind?’
What industries are we entering and reshaping? What doors are we leaving open? What younger woman is watching us and calibrating her own sense of what is possible based on what she observes?
UNICEF estimates that 7.6 million girls in Nigeria are currently out of school — the largest out-of-school girl population in sub-Saharan Africa. That is not a pipeline problem. That is a pipeline collapse. It will not be solved by speeches. It will be solved by women in positions of influence who treat mentorship not as an optional generosity but as part of the job.
7.6 million girls in Nigeria are currently out of school, the largest out-of-school girl population in sub-Saharan Africa. (UNICEF Nigeria Girls Education Factsheet, June 2022)
Respect Is Built, Not Requested
There is a version of the gender equality conversation that is almost entirely reactive. It catalogues what has been done to women, the discrimination, the glass ceilings, the casual dismissals, and asks society to do better. That conversation is necessary. But it is incomplete.
Respect, particularly in societies where it is heavily tied to visible contribution, does not expand primarily through demand. It expands through presence and undeniable track record.
It grows when women are seen leading the companies that employ thousands. It grows when women are known for building institutions that outlast them. It grows through the accumulation of contribution that makes exclusion increasingly illogical, increasingly costly, increasingly embarrassing for those who practice it.
The African Development Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in agricultural productivity alone, a sector where Nigerian women do the majority of the work but hold the minority of land rights, could increase total agricultural output by 20 to 30 percent. The economic argument for women’s full participation is not a soft one. It is structural. It is foundational.
But it requires women to build visibly. To lead openly. To stop apologising for occupying space and start filling it completely.
Closing Nigeria’s gender gap in agriculture alone could boost total output by 20–30%. The economic case for women’s leadership is structural, not sentimental. (AfDB)
The Nigerian Woman’s Next Chapter
The next phase of the Nigerian woman’s story cannot be built on rivalry dressed up as ambition. It cannot be built on classism masquerading as discernment. It cannot be built on a scarcity mindset that treats every other woman’s success as a threat to our own.
It must be built on something older and more durable than any of that.
It must be built on the understanding that competence is not diminished by sharing it. That influence does not decrease when you use it to open a door for someone else. That the women who shape the trajectory of societies are not simply the ones who rise, they are the ones who rise and, without losing a step, extend a hand.
The numbers make the case. The lived experience confirms it. And somewhere in this country, right now, there is a 22-year-old woman watching what we do with the room we are in and deciding whether it is worth fighting to get into a room of her own.
What are we showing her?
The Real Meaning of Give to Gain
Giving, in this context, is not charity.
It is the mentor who takes the call even when her schedule says no. It is the executive who champions a woman’s idea in the meeting where that woman is not present.
It is the collaborator who shares credit because she understands that shared wins compound. It is the woman who has made it choosing, deliberately and repeatedly, to make the path more visible for those still finding their way.
It is choosing legacy over ego. Substance over status. Long game over short one.
The future of Nigerian women will not be determined solely by how many of us make it into the room. It will be determined by what we do once we get there.
That is the real power of giving to gain.
*Tofunmi Akinseye is the founder/CEO of Savvy Media
