Nigeria’s Women Feed the Nation — But Still Farm on Borrowed Land

KADUNA STATE, Nigeria — It’s May, and Hajia Amina Akoma is planting rice on her farm in northwest Nigeria. Her feet sink into the brown, wet soil as she squats to press rice seeds into the ground. She follows a strict schedule every year: clearing in April, planting in May, and harvesting between October and November, just before the dry season, called harmattan. 

Akoma was born into a family of small-scale farmers in southern Kaduna. After getting married, she farmed with her husband on his family land in the neighboring city of Kakau. In 1984, her husband died, leaving her a single mother with four children. She went to the city of Fadama to rent and eventually own a plot of land, hiring a dozen farmers to help her tend to the soil. 

Farming is the most common occupation in Nigeria with about 38 percent of the country’s labor force working in agriculture. Across north-central Nigeria, women like Akoma make up the backbone of the country’s agriculture industry. They do most of the planting, weeding, harvesting, and processing, accounting for nearly 70 percent of food production in the country. But few of them own the land they work. In a region where land is inherited almost exclusively by men, most women farm on borrowed family plots, their husband’s land, or in exchange for wages. Without land titles, they can’t access loans, expand their operations, or build long-term wealth in a sector that contributes about 24 percent to the country’s GDP.

While Akoma owns her land, most women don’t have that luxury. In Vom, a quiet farming town in Plateau State, 31-year-old Rabi farms maize on her husband’s land and rents a separate plot to grow beans. The land isn’t hers, and that comes with strings attached.

“My husband doesn’t have a problem with me using his land,” she told More to Her Story, “as long as I keep enough of the harvest for us to eat at home.” Rabi asked to have only her first name published to protect her privacy.

This arrangement makes it hard for her to sell much or scale. Buying land of her own is out of reach. Like many rural women, Rabi can’t access formal loans from banks because she has no collateral, like land or other strong assets. 

“Only the rich women with something to give to the banks, or women with connections, can get bank loans,” she said. The alternatives are just as limiting: small cooperative societies that offer ₦100,000–₦200,000, or about $62.50 USD to $125 USD, at most, or loan sharks with interest rates that dig women into deeper debt.

Despite making up the majority of the agricultural labor force, women in Nigeria receive less than 10 percent of small and medium enterprise loans. For many women, the idea of scaling their farms remains a dream because they can’t get access to the capital needed to expand. Occasionally, the government or development agencies roll out empowerment schemes for women but the amounts are often symbolic, between ₦50,000 and ₦300,000, or $31 USD and $188 USD respectively, but never enough to make a real difference. 

Akoma benefited from a few agricultural funding programs over the years, but said the most she’s ever received was ₦400,000, or $250 USD.

“It helped me, but fertilizer and labor is expensive and, at the end, it doesn’t go as far as you want it to go,” she said.

The lack of capital also feeds into another dynamic: unequal and often tense relationships between women farmers and male laborers. While women can do a lot of work, some tasks, like beating rice from its shells require a lot of strength that expensive machines complete. Without access to capital to buy the machinery, women often rely on men to do these jobs. 

“If I had machines, I wouldn’t need to beg men to help me,” Akoma said. “Women can do the work, but men are faster. That’s the only reason.”

This help comes at a cost. Male laborers are paid more than women and often treated as indispensable. According to Rabi, she pays female laborers ₦2500, or $1.50 USD, and male laborers get ₦3500, or $2.20 USD daily. 

“You just can’t pay a man the same as a woman,” she said, when asked why. “They won’t accept it.”

According to Akoma, it’s easier to get men to agree to work when they’re paid more. 

“Male laborers can be difficult to work with, if you’re a woman,” she said. “You have to pay them more than women to get them to agree to the work.”

Still, some of her male hires have shouted at her, disrespected her, and even physically threatened her. 

“They don’t treat other men who hire them like this,” she said. “But because I’m a woman with no husband backing her, and especially now that I’m elderly.”

At the center of this inequality isn’t just land, but access. Women farmers in Nigeria are locked out of land, loans, and legitimacy, not because they lack skill or ambition, but because the systems meant to support agricultural growth are built around assets they don’t have. In a country where 63 percent of agricultural land is inherited and where men are favored by custom and practice, most women never get a fair starting point. Land is a gatekeeper. Without it, they can’t access formal loans, can’t scale, and can’t build wealth.

Beyond land ownership, it’s also how financial systems overwhelmingly favor men and wealthier, connected women who often don’t do much of the physical work themselves. These men can acquire land, secure bank loans, and hire others to run their farms. Meanwhile, the women doing the actual labor are paid as little as $2 USD a day, too little to provide a path to ownership or advancement.

In north central Nigeria, Maimuna, 41, works on other people’s farms as a day laborer, beside her daughters, two teenagers, and one pre-teen.

Some years, she’s lucky enough to convince a landowner to let her plant on a small plot for free, but the harvests are small and never enough to sell. 

 “We have the strength to farm, but no land or the money to do farming for ourselves,” said Maimuna, who asked that only her first name be heard. “Food is very expensive now. I see others who farm for themselves and how much they sell in the markets,” she said.

Maimuna used to work on her family’s land, but her husband sold that land and they’ve traveled from village to village, farming in exchange for cash, ever since.

Beyond the effects on these farmers, this dynamic affects the larger economy. The potential for agriculture in Nigeria is huge, according to Ndidi Nwuneli, an agriculture expert in Lagos and the founder of AACE Food Processing and Distribution Ltd., based in Lagos. Today, Nigeria is one of the world’s largest producers of grains, cassava, cashews, fruits, and tubers, a plant, with the potential to produce even more. Nwuneli said that Nigeria’s agricultural productivity is severely limited due to inadequate funding to the people who need it the most.

In addition, local farmers and laborers don’t get the quality products needed for successful farming. “There is an urgent need for improvements in productivity, via access to improved seeds, fertilisers, water management techniques, equipment, financing, and markets,” said Nwuneli. Today, only about five percent of Nigerian farmers use improved seeds because there are significant problems with seed availability, quality, and pricing.”

Rural women like Maimuna are actively holding up an agricultural system that thrives on their cheap labor while offering them no future. The government’s response which is typically small empowerment funds or token grants often miss the point entirely. Without access to land, credit, or structural reform, these women remain trapped in cycles of survival work, unable to build anything lasting. Until this is fixed, the women who feed the nation will remain stuck farming on borrowed land, with borrowed power.