KWASU professor calls for better credit access for women farmers

Nigerian women farmers need more than encouragement to expand their role in agriculture, according to Prof. Taibat Yusuf. They need access to land, credit, training and infrastructure that reflects the realities of their lives.

Yusuf, an agricultural economics professor at Kwara State University in Malete, made the case while delivering the university’s 23rd Inaugural Lecture, titled “Empowering Women Farmers in Nigeria: Closing the Gender Gap for Agricultural Transformation and Food Security.” Drawing on more than three decades of field-based research, she said empowering women farmers could raise agricultural productivity, strengthen food security and reduce poverty.

She identified discriminatory land ownership practices as a major barrier. Yusuf called for inheritance-law reforms that would protect women’s rights to own and inherit land regardless of marital status, as well as joint land ownership for married couples. Without secure land rights, women often struggle to obtain credit, farm inputs and other productive resources.

Her proposals also included microcredit schemes that do not require land as collateral and loan products designed for women farmers. She urged financial institutions to expand digital services into remote rural communities. Agricultural extension services, she said, should recruit more women, offer training schedules compatible with domestic responsibilities and use mobile platforms to provide advice in local languages.

Yusuf also pointed to rural water, electricity and childcare as ways to reduce unpaid domestic work and free time for farming and agribusiness. She advocated mechanised processing and other labour-saving technologies, alongside adult literacy, agricultural training and cooperatives that could improve management skills, technology adoption and bargaining power. She further called for support for off-farm work, agro-processing, contract farming and public-private credit programmes, together with better roads, storage, transport, cold-chain facilities and market information to reduce food losses.