Getting to the last mile, by Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

The annual Gender And Inclusion Summit, convened by the Policy Innovation Center (PIC) took place September 8th-9th. The theme for this year was ‘From Agenda to Action: Making Innovations Count for the Last Mile’. I chaired the Economic Inclusion session, and these are my remarks. I congratulate Dr Osasuyi Dirisu, Executive Director of PIC and the organisation’s leadership, for another excellent convening. I am delighted to be here for this year’s Gender and Inclusion Summit. As we will hear from many of the presentations at this Summit, Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of laudable policies, programmes, pilots or innovations for women’s economic opportunities and empowerment. The question we must ask ourselves is: Why have these interventions not sufficiently altered the underlying conditions that determine women’s economic power? Some recent comparative data makes this question difficult to avoid. In 2025, Nigeria ranked 124th of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s

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