Nigeria At A Crossroads: Gains, Setbacks & The Urgent Fight For Women’s Rights

By HAUWA MAGANA

OCTOBER 2025 offered a revealing snapshot of Nigeria’s ongoing struggle for gender equality—a month marked by advocacy, controversy, and the stark realities faced by women and girls across the country. From the halls of the National Assembly to conflict-scarred communities in Zamfara, the nation’s gender landscape showed both promising momentum and deepening vulnerabilities.

At the centre of national debate was the renewed push for the Reserved Seats for Women Bill, arguably the most ambitious legislative effort yet to correct decades of political exclusion. Women leaders, youth groups, and gender-rights advocates made a coordinated call for structural reform, warning that Nigeria risks sliding even further behind global standards if women continue to be locked out of governance. Experts emphasise that constitutional quotas remain the most direct path to breaking historical barriers in political participation.

Yet even as policymakers debated representation in Abuja, a heartbreaking reality unfolded hundreds of kilometres away. In Zamfara State, insecurity, poverty, and displacement fuelled a disturbing surge in child marriages. Families, trapped between violence and hunger, have begun marrying off their daughters—some as young as 13—in a desperate attempt to protect them from rape, abduction, and exploitation. What they see as “protection” often becomes another route to harm, leaving girls abandoned, pregnant, and uneducated. The normalisation of child marriage under the pressure of conflict is a grim reminder that gender inequality in Nigeria is not merely a policy debate—it is a matter of survival.

Civil society groups stepped up in response. The Women Aid Collective (WACOL) launched new partnerships with religious and cultural leaders—community influencers critical to shifting norms at the grassroots. Their strategy recognises that laws alone cannot rewrite cultural attitudes; meaningful progress requires mobilising the voices people trust most.

Meanwhile, women leaders at the Voice of Women Conference warned that rising insecurity, economic instability, and persistent exclusion from decision-making threaten to reverse the gains made over the past decade. Organisations such as WIMBIZ pressed for labour reforms—longer maternity leave, paternity leave, and gender-balanced leadership—to align Nigeria’s work environment with modern standards.

The month also brought stories of women driving change from the frontlines of innovation. In the STEAM space, tech founder Excellence Joshua shared her story of navigating motherhood while building a tech incubator that equips women with digital skills and new opportunities. Her message—“lift as you climb”—reflected a growing determination among women leaders to widen the ladder for others.

On the policy front, Pathfinder International unveiled a platform for women-led climate and health innovations, reinforcing the global understanding that empowering women is essential to building resilient communities.

But the national mood was unsettled by controversy. President Tinubu’s decision to include Maryam Sanda, convicted of killing her husband, among those granted presidential clemency provoked public outrage and reopened old wounds for the victim’s family. The presidency eventually clarified the decision by commuting, rather than pardoning, her death sentence. The incident reignited emotionally charged conversations about justice, violence, and accountability in a system where victims’ families often feel unseen.

Justice also took centre stage in Lagos, where a man was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a seven-year-old girl—one of the few cases where survivors of gender-based violence see swift legal redress.

Taken together, the events of October illustrate a country wrestling with its future. Nigeria’s gender landscape is shifting: advocacy is louder, innovation is growing, and women are refusing silence. But insecurity, discriminatory norms, policy delays, and the politicisation of justice continue to threaten progress.

Nigeria stands at a crossroads. The question is whether the nation will strengthen the foundations for gender equality—or allow old patterns to persist, at the expense of women and girls who can no longer afford to wait.