All Work, No Pay

Hey, Hannatu here 👋

Sunday, March 8, was International Women's Day. 

A day to celebrate women's achievements and push for gender equality.

But in sub-Saharan Africa's farming communities, the celebration feels incomplete. 

Walk into any farming community across sub-Saharan Africa. 

Watch who's in the fields at dawn. 

Women are planting, weeding, and harvesting. They're milking cows, processing crops, hauling produce to markets.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women contribute up to 80% of agricultural labor.

But when you ask who owns the land being farmed, who holds the cattle titles, who controls the tractors and irrigation systems, it’s almost always men.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, productive agricultural assets are controlled through patrilineal inheritance systems. 

Land titles pass from father to son. 

Livestock ownership follows male family lines. 

Capital-intensive equipment like tractors, irrigation systems, and processing machinery belongs to men.

In Nigeria, about 76% of agricultural land is inherited, with customary and statutory law overwhelmingly favouring male heirs. 

You’ll find the same patterns everywhere. Women make up just 15% of agricultural landholders globally.

Women may farm land for decades, but they never own it. 

They work their husband's plots, their father's fields, or their in-laws' farms.

Women's primary asset in this system is their labor. 

They contribute the physical work that keeps African agriculture functioning, but labor, no matter how valuable, doesn't translate to ownership.

This creates a structural imbalance with big economic consequences. 

Without owning land or livestock, women can't access bank loans. 

They can't buy machinery to scale their farms. 

They can't invest in irrigation or improved seeds. 

And labor, no matter how valuable, doesn't convert into ownership.

The core economic problem is straightforward: banks want collateral. 

They want to see a land title, a cattle registration document, or equipment ownership papers before they lend money. 

And women's decades of farming experience don't count as collateral.

Labor generates daily income but doesn't create the collateral needed to access formal credit.

In Nigeria, female farmers receive less than 10% of small and medium enterprise bank loans despite being the majority of the agricultural workforce. 

So women receive fewer loans. 

But interestingly, they're the ones who repay loans the most. 

According to Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank, women are more bankable, with up to 98% of them repaying their loans.

The alternative financing opportunities for women aren't much better. 

Small cooperative societies offer ₦100,000—₦200,000 ($62–$125 USD) at most in Nigeria. 

Microfinance institutions provide slightly larger amounts but at interest rates of 20-35% annually. These sums are too small for meaningful agricultural investment like buying land, installing irrigation, and purchasing machinery.

Without collateral, women remain locked out of the capital needed for productivity upgrades. 

They stay concentrated in labor-intensive, low-margin segments of agriculture, while men with land and livestock access loans to scale in the agriculture value chains.

This ownership gap doesn't just stop at individual women.

The entire agricultural productivity of countries is affected. 

Studies show that if women farmers had equal access to productive resources as men, agricultural output could increase by 20-30% in many African countries.

Agricultural expert and President of The ONE Campaign, Ndidi Nwuneli, points out that Nigeria's agricultural productivity is severely limited due to inadequate funding reaching the people who need it most. 

"There is an urgent need for productivity improvements, via access to improved seeds, fertilizers, water management techniques, equipment, financing, and markets," she explains.

Nigeria is one of the world's largest producers of grains, cassava, cashews, and tubers. 

Yet only about 5% of Nigerian farmers use improved seeds due to problems with availability, quality, and pricing. 

The women doing 70-90% of the actual farming work can't access the inputs that would multiply their productivity.

And when they do manage to farm, the inequalities don't stop at asset ownership. They extend to how much women get paid for their labor.

The labor imbalance extends beyond ownership to compensation. 

Even when farms hire workers, male laborers command higher wages for the same tasks. 

In Nigeria, female agricultural laborers earn ₦2,500 ($1.50) daily while male laborers receive ₦3,500 ($2.20) for identical work.

According to Akoma, a farm owner in Kaduna, north-western Nigeria, the men simply refuse to accept the same wages as women. 

Because she has no money for machinery, she has to depend on male labor for tasks requiring strength or equipment, like rice threshing.

“Men are usually faster than women when it comes to this, because it requires a lot of strength and speed,” she says.

When I asked what would happen if she insisted on equal pay, her granddaughter laughed. “They might beat her if she tries that,” she says.

This vulnerability is exactly why women across Africa are turning to collective action. 

Women across Africa are finding workarounds through collective action. 

Women-led agricultural cooperatives pool savings to lease or purchase land and livestock that individual members couldn't access alone. 

What one woman can't collateralize, fifty women together can.

In Nigeria, women-only cooperatives like the Nigeria Women Cooperative Federation Alliance (NIWCOFA) and Azma Cooperative Society have consistently helped women generate more income and access more funding.

Members contribute savings to buy land or produce collectively or negotiate group leases, then divide the income among themselves. 

This creates ownership pathways that traditional inheritance systems deny.

They replace individual collateral requirements with collective guarantees. 

When twenty women farmers approach suppliers together, they negotiate better input prices than any single farmer could. When they deliver produce collectively to markets, volume and consistency command higher prices.

But cooperatives work around the ownership problem rather than solving it. 

They create collective access to assets while underlying legal structures still favor male ownership of land and livestock.

Rwanda has made significant progress with land reforms guaranteeing women equal inheritance rights, but implementation remains inconsistent in rural areas. 

Nigeria passed the Land Use Act in 1978 to improve women's land access, yet customary law often overrides statutory provisions.

In many rural communities, families simply don't register land jointly even when the law allows it.

Microfinance and cooperative banking have helped bridge the collateral gap for some women, providing credit based on group guarantees rather than individual assets. 

But these remain workarounds for a structural problem. 

They provide small amounts of capital when what's needed is fundamental ownership reform.

The real agricultural potential that we look forward to remains locked behind an ownership structure that treats women's labor as valuable while denying them access to the assets that could multiply that value.

The question facing African policymakers: can agricultural modernization actually happen while excluding half the workforce from asset ownership?

The data says no.

This International Women's Day, we want to hear about how more women across Africa are finding ways around these barriers. 

Which women-led agric solutions in your country deserve recognition? 

In next week's Ag Safari edition, we will feature the top 10 women-led agricultural solutions across Africa based on your submissions.

Share the names of cooperatives, startups, organizations, or individual women farmers who are breaking through these ownership barriers in their communities.

👉🏾Tell us here.

P.S: And if this story resonated with you, pass it on. Someone in your network needs to read this. Share Ag Safari!

Cheers,