Summary
Some women farmers in the Zonkwa area of Kaduna State, northwestern Nigeria, have become landowners after years of being laborers. Despite this, these women faced the challenges of absence of government fertilisers, burden of house chores that limited their working hours, and failed policy promises.
One Sunday afternoon, across the fields of Anguwan Mission in Zonkwa area of Kaduna State, northwestern Nigeria, Martha Saleh bent low in the middle of her five-hectare plot, tugging weeds from tidy rows of corn. She paused, wiped sweat from her brow, and bent to continue.
“I never thought I would say this land is mine,” she said softly.
Martha remembers the years she bent her back on farm fields she could never call her own. In those days, she and other women would trek from Anguwan Mission to One Man Village, a walk of more than an hour, to plant maize and groundnuts on other people’s land. Some days they earned as little as ₦2,000, while on others they might earn ₦10,000. Sometimes the owners withheld cash and gave them a portion of the harvest instead.
Even with the long hours they spend working under the sun, their earnings were barely enough to feed their families. “We worked hard, yet it felt like we were not making progress,” Martha said. And during that time, many couldn’t afford to buy small household needs without taking loans.
One morning in 2015, Martha gathered 19 other women under a mango tree in Anguwan Mission and told them it was time to benefit more from the farm labour they were doing. And so, they formed Cigaban Taimakon Mata, a name that translates to the Progressive Group for Women’s Development. They also agreed that all the money earned from working on other people’s farms would go into a collective savings account. At the end of each month, the earnings would be shared equally. Within two years, their savings were large enough that they felt confident to approach community chiefs about buying farmlands of their own.
Land was still affordable then,” Martha said. A plot cost between ₦50,000 and ₦100,000, and, to their surprise, the chiefs did not resist the idea of women owning property. Instead, they supported the group and even helped with the paperwork.
“I bought mine for ₦80,000,” Martha recalled. “Now, the same-sized plots go for more than ₦500,000.”
Agnes Stephen, another member of the group, was able to buy a plot for ₦70,000. “Before owning land, I worked as a labourer on other people’s farms,” she said. “I would leave at dawn with a hoe and return at dusk with blistered palms and a little money,” she said.
Now, for the first time in their lives, these women are no longer labourers for hire, but landowners. Their success story is very rare in a country where women who perform 70% of the country’s farm labour own just one in five plots of land, according to the 2023 National Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Policy and Action Plan from the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs.
The group’s members come from various ethnic backgrounds, but the majority are Bajju, a prominent ethnic group in southern Kaduna. Martha explained that in Bajju tradition, women can’t inherit land and are only given it for temporary use, but never with full ownership rights. And this is the struggle she and her fellow women managed to overcome. By taking on labour to earn their own money, they were able to afford their own land and break free from a system that denied them full ownership.
Yet, for other women in Kaduna, the struggle for land ownership continues. Hannatu, a 41-year-old widow from the Kachia area of southern Kaduna who didn’t provide her surname, is one of them. After her husband died in 2022, his brothers claimed the small farm she had cultivated with him, insisting that tradition gave them the first right to the land. Today, she hires herself out for daily labour, hoping to secure work on people’s farms and earn a wage.
“I spend my days bent over ridges of maize in each planting season,” she told Social Voices over the phone. She explained that her earnings, which range from ₦5,000 to ₦15,000, are used to support the feeding and well-being of her two younger children.
Her experience is a common one in the area, where widows have no legal title to land. Even when they are allowed to farm their late husbands’ fields, they do so under the constant threat of losing them to in-laws and never get to have full ownership.
Law vs. lived reality
Maryam Musa Gusau, a Kaduna-based lawyer, said nothing in the federal Land Use Act of 1978 prevents women from owning land. “The Act says any person can own land, whether man or woman,” she explained, adding that in Kaduna, certificates of occupancy are issued by the state through the state’s Geographic Information Service (KADGIS), but in rural areas, community chiefs still play a decisive role under what is called a customary right of occupancy.
Maryam noted that in places like southern Kaduna where customary laws are treated as more powerful than constitutional provisions, those customs are legally null and void. “Any practice that contradicts the Constitution cannot stand,” she said. “Women should enforce their rights under the law and, if denied, seek redress in court.”
However, Martha explains that most rural women rarely take such cases to court not only to avoid conflict with family members, but also because legal battles are expensive, slow, and intimidating.
A 2024 study by the East-West Seed Foundation, a non-profit that supports smallholder farmers, found that most women in Kaduna still rely on rented or family land and often lack the money to hire labour or buy inputs. Social norms also weigh heavily, leaving them with little say in how farms are managed. The study suggested savings and loan schemes, targeted training, and stronger community engagement as ways to give women both resources and decision-making power.
Policy promises
In a bid to address these challenges, the Kaduna State government launched its Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) Policy in November 2024 with a ₦5 billion fund to empower 15,000 women through 750 cooperatives. The policy, drafted after statewide town halls, promised fertiliser distribution, access to credit, and tailored training for women farmers.
Martha and her group attended the meetings where government officials and development experts explained that women needed to organise, register as cooperatives, and then apply for financial support. They followed the instructions carefully, even filing the necessary paperwork, said Shattu Danladi, who keeps the group’s records. “They told us once we had our certificate, the grants would come. So now we wait, with hope,” she said.
Hauwa Yusuf, a professor of criminology and gender studies at Kaduna State University who consulted on the policy development, said the model is designed to link finance directly to women’s groups rather than individuals. “When women organise as cooperatives, they can access funds more easily, and with certificates of registration, government support is traceable. So we hope this will truly benefit the women,” she explained. “The disbursements of the money haven’t fully started, but it will soon.”
In collaboration with Dev-Afrique Development Advisors, the Kaduna State Ministry of Human Services and Social Development held a workshop in July to promote the effective implementation of the state’s WEE policy. During the event, the Ministry’s Commissioner, Rabi Salisu Ibrahim, urged women entrepreneurs to register for the ₦5 billion empowerment grant. She also noted that the ministry aims to disburse the funds to 10,000 women organised in cooperatives or clusters but has only received 2,000 registrations so far.
Also in August, the Kaduna government stepped up to support smallholder farmers in the state, where Governor Uba Sani led the distribution of free fertilizer to at least 100,000 farmers, with each person receiving two bags.
But while the fertiliser made its way to different parts of Kaduna, including some communities in Zonkwa, women in Anguwan Mission were left out.
“The government says they shared. But here, we are still waiting,” said Shattu.
The prices of fertilisers have surged across Nigeria this year, with a 50-kilogram bag of urea now selling for about ₦50,000, up from ₦37,000 it sold during the previous farming season. According to local farmers, NPK fertiliser blends such as 20:10:10 now cost between ₦10,000 and ₦30,000, depending on the bag size. The “20:10:10” refers to the ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium which are three key nutrients that crops need to grow. To put that in perspective, a single bag of maize often sells for less than ₦40,000, meaning one bag of fertilizer can cost more than a bag of harvest.
For Shattu, who farms two small plots, buying enough fertilizer could swallow her yearly earnings and she says without it, she risks lower yields. According to the National WEE Policy, Nigerian male farmers use over eight times more fertilizer and 50% more herbicide per hectare than their female counterparts. This is a problem that Shattu tracks with a worried eye, explaining that the rising cost of farming inputs is a constant threat to their hard-won independence.
Progress, but with limits
In the absence of government fertilisers, the group leader, Martha, says they resort to collecting cow dung from fields occupied by cattle herds, which they dry and spread on their farms. With this method, Martha, who now hires labourers, harvests as many as 50 bags of maize in a season, and Social Voices learned that she is using the proceeds to pay her children’s school fees, buy seed in bulk ahead of next planting season, and even set aside grain for relatives that cannot afford food or don’t have farmlands to grow their own food.
Shattu believes in farming more than ever. She says what the land has given her goes beyond just food.
“After harvests, we put some portions aside to support families that don’t have food,” Shattu shared. “And while we also educate our children with the earnings from the farms, we buy books and uniforms for less privileged students across our communities.”
Agnes also feels pride in her harvests. Last season, she sold surplus soybeans at the market and used the money to buy new school uniforms for her children, and even paid for her youngest son’s malaria treatment at a pharmacy store in Anguwan Mission without having to borrow a single naira.
“The farm gives me a sense of security,” Agnes said. “It makes me feel independent and capable of taking care of my family.”
But independence hasn’t freed Agnes and the other women in Zonkwa from the demands of home because after spending the day in the fields, they still return to fetch water, cook meals, wash clothes, and care for their children and husbands. And these duties limit their ability to farm on a large-scale even as they push against the barriers that once kept them from owning land at all.
This article was first published on Socialvoices.
