The World Bank has approved a loan of $500 million for women empowerment in Nigeria.
The facility is a scale-up financing for Nigeria for Women Programme, which was initially approved on June 27, 2018, with $100 million financing.
The NFWP has been implemented in six states and provides support to over 427,887 Women Affinity Groups’ members through the formation and strengthening of 20,506 of these groups.
In about two years, the WAGs have saved about NGN 4 billion, with a significant percentage of these funds in circulation as loans at any given time. So far, 835,573 community members have benefitted from the NFWP through different interventions.
“The NFWP-SU will help to ensure better economic opportunities for women, which is essential for addressing gender inequality; guaranteeing better education, health, and nutrition outcomes for families; and building women’s and communities’ resilience to climate change,” the World Bank said in a statement.
It called on government to address issues that inhibit women’s economic empowerment and hinder inclusive, low-carbon, and resilient economic growth, noting that women’s empowerment is essential to their ability to build resilience to climate change and, by extension, the resilience of their households and communities.
According to the statement, World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Shubham Chaudhuri, said the institution had seen promising outcomes from the parent NFWP which has helped to create economic opportunities for thousands of rural women through the Women Affinity Groups. “NFWP’s model is helping to improve livelihood opportunities for women and enhancing their capacity to adapt to climate change and to participate in local administrations for policymaking related to community empowerment.
“Closing the gender gap in key economic sectors could yield gains of between $9.3bn and $22.9bn, we are optimistic that this scale-up will help Nigeria to move closer to bridging this gap.”
Task Team Leader for Nigeria for Women Project, Michael Ilesanmi, was also quoted to have said, “The Program aims to mobilize poor and vulnerable women into different institutions and, using these institutional platforms, link them to markets as well as financial and non-financial services.”
