Gender in niGeria report 2012 - Economic Commission for Africa

Gender in Nigeria Report 2012: Improving the Lives of Girls and Women in Nigeria 21
largest disparity: here, only 4% of women own land, a rate 13 times lower than that of
men. Land ownership in urban areas (table 11) shows a similar pattern; men are five
times more likely to own land than women. Lack of land ownership in urban areas has
implications not only for shelter, security and access to services but also for wealth
creation, because many urban micro-enterprises use homes as a staging post.
4.4 Women in enterprise
Women run only 20% of enterprises in the formal sector (World Bank, 2009: 92).
23% of these enterprises are in the retail sector. Women make up 37% of the total work
force in the garment industry. They are very poorly represented in the wood, metals,
chemicals, construction, and transport industries. In general the report finds that more
women are in the formal sector in the South than in the North, and that the rate of
female entrepreneurship in the micro sector is higher in the more industrialised States of
the South (36%) than in the North (23%). This suggests that many of the opportunities
for micro-enterprises are linked to the formal manufacturing sector.
Limited opportunities for employment and a rather small medium-scale
enterprise sector has meant that micro or informal enterprise has become
a default strategy for many Nigerians. A majority of the 43% of women cited
as economically inactive make their living through micro-enterprises. 16 The recently
completed “2010 Access to Financial Services in Nigeria” shows that owning a business
has become the main source of income for 19.5 million adult Nigerians (EFInA, 2011).
23% of the respondents in this survey indicated “own business” as the main source
of income, ahead of farming (18.7%) and wage employment (12.6%). The importance
of micro-enterprises as the main source of income makes it a strategic area for the
empowerment of women. Recent work (World Bank, 2009: 92) shows that women in
the micro-enterprise sector tend to be better educated, and that more of them report
vocational and graduate education compared to men. There are suggestions that
barriers to both formal employment and opportunities for formal enterprise may in part
explain this (Kwakwaet al., 2008). Ethnographic work suggests that women play an
active role in market associations (Porter et al., 2010).
4.5 Access to finance and fairer
taxation
The importance of micro-enterprise for women makes access to business
finance a key determinant of their ability to make a living; yet about 65% of
Nigerians have no bank account (Bamsile, 2006) and rely on informal and other
formal microfinance institutions for access to capital. For rural women, opportunities
for non-farm, non-agricultural opportunities are constrained by their lack of access to
capital (Izugbara, 2008). Women venturing into manufacturing are more likely to rely on
family and friends for finance, partly because they lack collateral security (Madichie and
Nkamnebe, 2010), but also because they are more likely than men to be deterred from
applying for formal loans by the complexity of the application process. (35% of women
said they were deterred, 26% of men). 17
Women without collateral security struggle to obtain finance for off-farm
activities. Data from the NBS (2009) show that men are twice as likely to secure
finance compared to women. In 2007, for example, some 20,098 men accessed loans
compared to 8,550 women. About 64% of the N528,251 that was loaned went to
male applicants. A recent World Bank report on the “Investment Climate in Nigeria” 18
16 See Kwakwa et al. (2008).
17 World Bank (2010: 96).
18 World Bank (2009).