An International Women’s Day Reflection by Joy Akut
It is often said that women multiply what is placed in their hands. Give her a home, she builds a family. Give her a classroom, she shapes the next generation, quietly, persistently, often without recognition. Give her a small loan and a market stall, and watch how she turns it into school fees, a better roof, food for her family. Give her a voice, and she will not just speak for herself. She will speak for the ones who had no platform to begin with.
This is not mythology. It plays out every day: in the woman who runs a provisions store in Lagos Island and employs four people, in the okpa seller in Enugu who has quietly produced three engineers and a doctor, in the community health worker in rural Borno who knows every child’s name and vaccination record. Women have always taken what is placed in their hands and made it go further than it was supposed to.
The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day beautifully spotlights this fact, even as we look at deeper issues. And today, it is a gentle probe for us to pause and ask: why, when women rise to ask for a seat at the table, does the request still get misread?
It is not a demand for charity. It is not a zero-sum grab for power that must come at someone else’s expense. It is, at its core, an invitation to let the multipliers into the rooms where the decisions are made, not because they are better, but because they bring a different perspective.
International Women’s Day this year is built around a deceptively simple idea: give to gain. It sounds almost transactional, but the meaning runs deeper than that. It is asking us to reckon with what we have been leaving on the table by treating women’s inclusion as optional.
When societies give women genuine space in decision-making, something structural shifts. Budgets get interrogated differently when the person asking the questions has spent years stretching a household income. Infrastructure gets designed with different priorities when the planner knows, what it means to walk two kilometres for water before sunrise, or for a woman in labour in a rural area to drive miles before she finds a primary health care facility to deliver her child. Policies that once looked fine on paper get stress-tested against lived reality.
This is what women bring into rooms that have operated without them for too long. Not softness as a counterweight to toughness. That framing is too simple. It is more like depth. A refusal to separate the result from the person the result affects.
For years now, the evidence has been pointing in the same direction. Countries with higher rates of female political participation tend to pass more legislation on public health, education, and child welfare. Companies with women in senior leadership are more likely to survive economic downturns. Smallholder farms run by women, when given equal access to land and credit, produce yields that match or exceed their male counterparts. The data is not ambiguous, nor is the pattern a coincidence.
The multiplying is already happening. The question is whether we are creating conditions for it to scale.
Giving women space in leadership is not a concession to political correctness, neither is it a favour. It is an acknowledgement of what exclusion has been costing us: unrealised ideas, policies built on incomplete pictures, the accumulated weight of talent that was never fully deployed.
Nigeria has no shortage of capable women. Neither does the rest of Africa, nor the rest of the world. What has been in shorter supply is the institutional willingness to move beyond tokenism: beyond the single woman on the board, the female minister in a soft portfolio, the girl child campaign that fades after the press release. Granted, under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, we have seen women take up positions that begin to challenge that pattern. Now we need to see that progress reflected in our legislature, starting with the passage of the Reserved Seats Bill.
Real inclusion is structural. It is pipelines and mentorship and the deliberate dismantling of the unwritten rules that make certain rooms feel like they were not built for you. It is also the daily choice to listen, to step back, to share the platform without needing to be thanked for it.
When women rise, they rarely rise alone. That is almost the point. They tend to pull people with them: other women, younger girls watching from a distance, families whose trajectories shift because one person got a chance and made the most of it.
We have seen this enough times to stop being surprised by it. The grandmother who insisted on education when no one else did. The first female engineer in a firm who quietly made space for the second and the third. The community leader who turned a women’s group into a cooperative, then into a small development organisation.
International Women’s Day is not a celebration of arrival. Women have not arrived. Not fully. Not yet. It is more honest to call it a marker. A moment to look at the distance already covered and the distance still ahead, and to recommit to the work. The promise embedded in this year’s theme is not complicated. Give women space, and they will do what they have always done with what they are given.
They will multiply it.
- Joy Akut is a writer and the Special Assistant on Youth and Women Affairs to the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. She writes from Abuja
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