Jigawa women farmers seek higher funding and secure land rights

The Small-Scale Women Farmers Organisation of Nigeria in Jigawa State has called for higher agricultural funding and improved access to land for women farmers. The organisation made the demand during a briefing on a budget accountability assessment conducted with the International Budget Partnership. The assessment covered 2021 to 2025 and found that agriculture accounted for an average of 6.58% of Jigawa’s approved budgets, below the 10% benchmark in the African Union’s Malabo Declaration.

Agricultural capital expenditure had an average execution rate of 65.9%. The assessment described this as the strongest progress among the five states reviewed, although Nasarawa recorded a higher execution rate of 72.6%. The report said Jigawa had institutionalised women farmers’ participation in budgeting.

It was the only state assessed where their priorities could be traced to specific budget lines, including a dedicated gender budget segment covering health, education and agriculture. Documented interventions included pumps, processing kilns and N50,000 grants reaching 13,680 SWOFON members. The organisation said the state still needed to measure how widely the support extended across its membership.

Customary land tenure was identified as the main constraint. Although 84.9% of surveyed members across the five states reported some improvement in access to land, 24.5% said they did not own land. SWOFON called for transparent records of beneficiary plots, stronger links to irrigation and farm-settlement programmes, and better storage, processing, transport, market information and financial services.

It also urged regular public reporting on allocations, releases, spending and beneficiaries.