By Raihanah Ibrahim

This Women’s Month, SCIDaR is launching the W-Accelerator – a structural commitment to enabling women to maximise their leadership potential. The push behind it comes from observing communities we serve, where the gap between opportunity and uptake has taught us that supply is never enough.

There is a question I have been asking for most of my career, and it often goes like this: if credible  opportunities for women exist, why aren’t they taking it?

I have asked it in clinics in northern Nigeria, watching immunisation registers fill with unvaccinated children whose mothers knew exactly where the health post was. I have wondered about it seeing women hesitant to take risk free loans on empowerment programmes.

I have asked it in boardrooms, watching women’s trajectories slow down somewhere between middle management and the C-suite. 

The answer, consistently, is the same: the opportunity is not the problem. The conditions around it are.

This Women’s Month, we are launching the W-Accelerator, SCIDaR’s cohort-based programme supporting high-potential women through career crafting, bespoke coaching, access to resources, and leadership development. But the thinking behind it did not come merely from a human resources framework. It came from the field, from three programmes that have spent years mapping the distance between what is available to women and what women are actually able to tap into. Something we call the demand gap.

What we built inside our own walls
Before we could make a sound argument about gender equality in communities, we had to be more deliberate about gender equality in SCIDaR as an institution. Are SCIDaR women able to easily access all the equal employment opportunities that we offer? Our SCIDaR W Initiative provided the platform to look inward.The gender audit we commissioned was not comfortable. It showed us that while our commitment to gender equity was genuine, our enabling systems to achieve those commitments needed to be front-and-centre.

We realised that beyond ambition and the intrinsic drive to take advantage of opportunities, women were often navigating corporate structures that had not been designed with a full spectrum of women’s realities in mind. The system itself was not malicious, it was just not most intentional about the peculiar considerations for women in the workplace, and thus, could not fully deliver benefits to almost half of its employees.

We began to re-engineer our institutional environment to work for women. Because representation matters, we set strategic goals to increase female representation on our board from 13 per cent to 50 per cent.  To support parents, SCIDaR invested in an on-site crèche, to ensure they can have their wards in close proximity while they work.

Additionally SCIDaR offers a paid and mandatory leave for new mothers and fathers. There is also a flexibility to increase the leave period without any concerns or risk of new parents losing their jobs. The availability of the leaves to both mothers and fathers makes an argument that we also make in the communities we serve: caregiving is not a women’s issue.

It is a human one. Upon return from leaves, we established reintegration protocols that allow mothers ease into their work, and afforded them the opportunity to switch project teams, establish new working modalities, and undergo performance appraisals that might have been missed – all ensuring the playing field is level and that absence for parental reasons does not become a disadvantage. We’ve also upgraded our health insurance and wellness support packages to ensure staff can access the critical women’s health and wellness services they need to thrive.

Beyond this, the organisation is embedding gender equity more structurally. In 2025, SCIDaR reviewed and updated over 35 organisational policies to integrate gender considerations and developed a standalone Gender Policy to strengthen accountability.

These steps all come together to ensure that support is not ad hoc, but institutionalised and sustained.

The W-Accelerator is the natural next step – a career catalyst. It mines the potential in mid-level female staff by giving them a named coach, a structured life stage approach for career planning, a network of peer advisors, and senior sponsors who open doors deliberately, to resources and opportunities for the participants to level up their careers while being able to show up in their many other roles outside the workplace.

Because we know, from building an institution, and from working in the field, that the friction slowing women down is structural – and so, our solutions must also be structural. 

What we have learned in communities
The same principle, that conditions determine uptake, is what three of SCIDaR’s community programmes have been demonstrating at scale.

CRoWN: the Community Reorientation Women Network, works in Northern Nigeria, in the communities where maternal mortality, zero-dose children, malnutrition, and out-of-school rates are highest – despite interventions by stakeholders. The initiative onboards and empowers culturally-competent women from within these communities as ambassadors. Because these women are already trusted, visible, and familiar with local norms, they are able to communicate health and social service information in ways that are simple, true, timely, and culturally accepted, and have the influence to resolve bottlenecks caregivers face as they navigate access to better services.

The result is that immunisation and antenatal care previously underutilised due to low trust, social restrictions, or misinformation are now being accessed. So far, our 12,000+ CRoWN ambassadors have reached 152,076 women and 723,711 children across 607,038 households. Each ambassador, on average, reaches approximately 51 households, meaning a single trained, trusted woman carries health knowledge, referral linkages, and social permission deep into an entire neighbourhood. That is the multiplier. Invest in one woman, and the returns are not linear. They cascade. 

One of CRoWN’s ambassadors, Rabia, in Sokoto State, captures it precisely. She joined the programme and gained not just health knowledge, but a structure for economic activity through its savings scheme and business start-up support. That financial independence and the voice she has as an agent of change in her community, has in turn changed her standing in the community.

When she tells her neighbours to bring their children for immunisation, they act on it, not just because of what she knows, but because of who she has become: someone visibly in command of her own life. When the Community leader calls a meeting of stakeholders, she sits in the council of advisors and lends her word to advance her community – a rarity in Northern Nigeria, a thing of prestige for women like her. Her credibility as a health and development ambassador was built on her agency, and her sense of community. An interwomen fabric of care, trust, and power.

The Social normals Learning Collaborative (SNLC) studies the factors that determine what women do and what they believe they are allowed to do, due to the unwritten rules in their corner of the world that governs what is accepted or what is frowned upon. Across the Collaborative’s Practice network of over 80 member organisations, learning has shown that information alone rarely changes behaviour.

What changes behaviour is social permission; when trusted community leaders endorse a choice, when a woman sees her neighbour make a different decision and face no consequences, when the risk calculation shifts and people are safe from social sanctions.  Change happens when enough people see that enough people are changing.

The LC’s lessons ensure that SCIDaR’s programmes, and those of its partners, are designed around this reality of social norms – that humans exist as social interdependent beings, not despite it, and that designing for people must be with this understanding of human behaviour. 

SNLC describes demand this way: it is not the willingness to act; it is the ability and the permission. A woman in a community where health-seeking requires spousal approval is not apathetic. She is rational. She is doing the maths. And until the norm that requires that permission begins to shift, improving the supply of health services will not close the gap.

Our SAGE investment turns the mirror inwards by placing gender in the center of how we design and implement our interventions, and not merely as an add-on or another buzz word. Gender in itself is at the center of most social norms in our implementing geographies – how a person interacts with an intervention is dependent on their gender and the gendered experiences of the people around them.

Through a dedicated gender integration team providing field and operations teams hands-on support, a field-tested Gender Integration Playbook, practical training sessions, and clear frameworks and gender markers, we have optimised how SCIDaR programmes are built. Teams now ask gender-related questions at the design stage, not after the fact.

We have shifted gender from a checkbox to a deliberate lens through which we envision, plan, implement, and monitor our solutions. More projects are set up to meet the needs of the populations we serve, because they meet them where they are, and they do so with an intention to remove barriers that are often influenced by gender and by social norms. 

The half of the equation we keep ignoring
The development sector is reasonably good at supply. We build clinics, train health workers, create programmes, write policies. What we often underestimate is the strengthening of the demand side: the community trust, cultural constructs and systems, the norms that need to shift for our people and communities to thrive, and trusted intermediaries that determine whether any of that supply is actually used.

Demand is not about whether women want to participate. In my experience, women almost always want to. Demand is about whether the environment makes participation rational, safe, and sustainable. A mother who knows the vaccine schedule but cannot act without her husband’s approval may not immunise her child no matter how much she desires it. 
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Concluded.

The same logic applies inside institutions. A woman who has absorbed, over years of subtle signals, that business leadership may conflict with family responsibilities, may not raise her hand for an opportunity that is, on paper, fully open to her.

She has done the maths too. The W-Accelerator exists to change the equation, to actively support, through structure and investment, that she was always meant to walk through that door, and to fuel her motion and give her a map to enable her walk through it safely and confidently, without every compromising on excellence, or on a wholesome life outside work. 

Why this is everyone’s business
Investing in women is not an act of generosity. It is a systems decision with documented returns.

When women have economic agency, household nutrition improves. When women complete secondary education, child mortality reduces. When women are supported, they contribute meaningfully to their families and their communities. The World Bank estimates that economies in low- and middle-income countries lose 1–2 per cent of GDP annually due to gender inequality. Nigeria cannot absorb that cost, and the development sector cannot keep investing in supply while leaving demand chronically underfunded, and then asking why outcomes are not moving.

What this month should actually demand
A Women’s Month that changes something ends with institutions having made at least one concrete commitment they did not have before March began. Not merely an infographic, or a cursory shout out or statement of inspiration to women. An intentional decision.

For employers and private sector organisations: make one structural change that reduces the penalty women pay for caregiving. A crèche. An equitable parental leave policy that is genuinely available. Bias-free appraisal mechanisms. Truly comprehensive maternal health care insurance packages. Balance in team structures. One real change is worth ten gender strategies on paper.

For government policymakers: Mandate gender-disaggregated data collection and public reporting across federal and state health programmes. Embed gender equity more broadly by strengthening interventions that support women’s economic empowerment, ensuring fair representation in leadership and decision-making roles, and addressing structural barriers that limit women’s access to opportunities.

For development and donor partners: Invest in  the demand side , norm-change programming, community systems, and longer programme cycles, recognising that TRUE change  takes years, not months. Equally important, engage with communities with openness and empathy: listen first, co-create solutions, and avoid designing interventions from a top-down or “saviour” lens. Fund what is hardest to measure in the hardest terrains, because that is often where it matters most.

At SCIDaR, the W-Accelerator is our answer to the question we needed to respond to. To every leader reading this, whether you run a company, a client portfolio, a field team, or a community, I would ask you to sit with the same question we did: what does your organisation actually produce for women, versus what it says it does?

The gap between the two is not a moral failure. It is a design problem. And design problems have solutions. The question is what yours will be, and when.

Dr Ibrahim is a principal at the Solina Centre for International Development and Research (SCIDaR), where she leads the organisation’s gender and demand portfolio. SCIDaR’s gender programmes span institutional gender transformation support, gender-intentional programme design and social behaviour change.