Author: Nyabiyadaticha Philemon Kadala
There is a familiar image in Nigerian agricultural development: a group of farmers gathered under a tree for a photograph, women, a young farmer or two, maybe someone using a cane or a wheelchair at the edge of the frame, while the real decisions about seed varieties, market linkages, and financing have already been made somewhere else, by someone else.
Everyone in the photo is present. Everyone will be counted in a results framework. But almost none of them were actually asked what they needed.
This is tokenism, and it is one of the most persistent and least examined failures in how Nigeria’s agrifood systems and market development programmes approach inclusion. It looks like progress. It photographs well. It satisfies a checkbox. But it changes almost nothing about who holds power over what gets grown, sold, financed, and valued.
Inclusion conversations in Nigerian agriculture tend to default to one group: women. That focus is well earned. National data show women farm extensively but manage only about 1 in 5 registered agricultural plots, and own outright only around 8 percent of land compared to roughly a third for men.
However, women are not the only group doing essential work in Nigeria’s agrifood systems while being routinely locked out of the decisions that shape it. Youth and persons with disabilities face the same pattern, often for the same underlying reason: presence is mistaken for power.
Nigeria has one of the youngest populations in the world, and youth employment in the country’s agrifood system has been growing faster than any other group’s, by some estimates, over 300 percent in the nonfarm segments of the sector, like processing and food trade, in the past two decades.
Yet a 2025 national youth report found nearly 80 million young Nigerians unemployed or underemployed, a sign that growth in the sector has not translated into real ownership or decision-making power for the young people driving it.
Meanwhile, Nigeria is home to an estimated 27 million people living with a disability, and a 2024 policy analysis found that fewer than 1 percent are formally employed anywhere, agriculture included. Researchers who study disability and farming in northern Nigeria note something telling: agricultural inclusion work tends to focus almost entirely on closing the gender gap, while the disability gap barely gets named at all.
If inclusion is going to mean anything in Nigeria’s agrifood systems, it has to move from a symbolic gesture to a deliberate commitment, for women, for youth, and for persons with disabilities alike. That shift rests on three things: voice, agency, and structural change. Miss any one of them, and inclusion collapses back into performance.
Voice Is Not the Same as Being Present
The first and most common confusion in inclusive development is treating presence as participation. Someone sitting in a stakeholder meeting is not the same as someone whose input shapes what happens next.
Genuine voice means a person’s perspective is actively sought out, seriously weighed, and visibly reflected in the outcome, not that they filled a seat required by a diversity target.
Nigeria’s plot manager data makes this concrete for women: doing the labour is not the same as deciding what happens with it. Youth face a mirror version of the same problem, heavily present as labour, barely present in planning, even as they power the fastest-growing parts of the sector.
Meanwhile, persons with disabilities are frequently missing from the conversation altogether, not because their input was weighed and set aside, but because programme design rarely considers that a farmer might use a wheelchair, have low vision, or need materials in an accessible format in the first place.
Real voice requires slower, less convenient processes: co-design sessions rather than validation workshops, feedback gathered before decisions are finalized rather than after, communication in the language and format people actually use, including Hausa, Fulfulde, and other local languages across Nigeria’s farming communities, and meeting people literally where they can get to.
Agency Means the Power to Say “No”
Voice without agency is just consultation theatre. Agency is the ability to act on what you’ve said, to choose, negotiate, hold assets, and walk away from an arrangement that doesn’t serve you.
For women, land ownership is the clearest test, and Nigeria’s numbers are stark: without land in her own name, a woman cannot easily access credit or pass on an asset to her children. For youth, the barrier is generational rather than gendered.
Land across much of rural Nigeria is controlled by older household heads, which is part of why the federal government recently recapitalised the Bank of Agriculture with roughly ₦1.5 trillion specifically to extend credit to young farmers who otherwise struggle to access finance without land as collateral.
For persons with disabilities, agency often comes down to something more basic still: accessible tools, transport, and information. A training delivered only in a crowded hall with no ramp, sign language interpretation, or accessible format materials has already decided, before it begins, who gets to act on what they learn
The cost of ignoring any of this is not abstract. Recent analysis found that Nigerian women who do manage farm plots produce around 30 percent less per hectare than men, not from any gap in skill, but from unequal access to fertiliser, extension advice, and better markets. Multiply that kind of gap across women, youth, and persons with disabilities simultaneously, and the lost productivity is not a rounding error. It is a structural drag on the whole system.
Structural Change Is the Part Everyone Skips
The hardest and most frequently abandoned piece of the equation is structural change, permanently shifting who holds decision-making power and who controls resources, rather than just adding new participants to an unchanged system.
This is where good intentions often stall, because it’s easy to fund activities that look transformative, women’s cooperatives, youth entrepreneurship trainings, disability sensitisation workshops, while leaving the underlying architecture untouched.
Structural change asks harder questions than most project plans are built to answer: Who actually controls the assets? Whose name is on the land title? Who sets the price? Who decides which crops get investment, and who was in the room when that decision was made?
Everyone in the System Has a Role, Not Just Policymakers
It’s tempting to treat this as a problem for government to solve through better policy. Policy matters, but it is only one lever among many, and treating it as the only one is its own kind of tokenism, a way of outsourcing responsibility instead of exercising it.
Government can do more than legislate; it can fund what it legislates. Nigeria already has a Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities (Prohibition) Act and land reform conversations underway. The gap is usually in implementation and budget, not intent. Ministries and agencies can require disability access and youth land pathways as conditions of programme funding, not just as aspirational language in a strategy document.
Development organisations and donors can stop measuring success by attendance sheets.
Tracking who spoke, whose recommendations were adopted, and who moved into leadership tells a very different story than a headcount, and it’s a story donors should be asking for, not just accepting the easier metric when it’s offered.
Private sector actors, agribusinesses, processors, and financial institutions decide who gets a contract, a loan, or a place in a supply chain, often with more day-to-day influence over people’s lives than any single programme. Collateral, lending products, supplier contracts that name women and young farmers directly rather than the male household head, and accessible design in everything from mobile apps to farm equipment are business decisions, not charity.
Cooperatives and farmer-based organizations are where a lot of this either lives or dies, because they are the closest layer of governance to the farmer. Rewriting a bye-law to remove a male co-signature requirement, or building a genuine leadership pipeline for young and female members rather than a token board seat, costs far less than donor-funded training and often outlasts it.
Women, youth, and persons with disabilities themselves are not just the subjects of this conversation but among its most effective drivers, when they’re resourced to organise on their own terms, forming their own associations, negotiating collectively, and setting their own agenda rather than waiting to be invited into someone else’s.
None of these actors can fix the whole system alone, but each one holds a lever the others don’t. The narrative changes when enough of them pull at the same time.
The Real Measure of Progress
Agrifood systems touch nearly every dimension of economic and social life in Nigeria’s farming communities.
Getting inclusion right here is not a peripheral nicety; it shapes whose labour is valued, whose knowledge counts, and who gets to build wealth from the land they work, whether that person is a woman, a young farmer trying to make agriculture a viable future, or someone whose disability was never the barrier, only the world’s failure to design around it.
The test of meaningful inclusion was never whether marginalised groups showed up. It is whether the systems around them changed because they did.
About the Author
Nyabiyadaticha Philemon Kadala is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Lead at Sahel Consulting, with over 6 years of demonstrated experience implementing integrated nutrition, gender-based violence, child protection, education, development and humanitarian programmes across multicultural environments.
