From Reporting to Responsiveness: What would it take for Nigeria to deliver on agenda 2063?

Every day, I find myself wondering how ambitious plans like Agenda 2063 would become real for women and girls because it is much harder to build institutions that deliver them. How does it move from a beautifully written framework into something that changes the life of a woman in Kano, a farmer in Benue, or a young girl growing up in Bayelsa? Like the Sustainable Development Goals before it, Agenda 2063 is one of those ambitious continental blueprints that promise to transform Africa. Every few years, we celebrate milestones, publish progress reports, and count down to another deadline. But I often find myself asking a different question: as these deadlines get closer, are we actually getting closer to the outcomes?

That question became even more interesting when I looked at the African Union’s aspirations for gender equality.

What surprised me was that the problem is not the absence of a framework. In fact, the African Union has gone much further than simply declaring that gender equality matters. Through Goal 17 of Agenda 2063, Full Gender Equality in All Spheres of Life, it has developed a comprehensive accountability architecture. Countries are assessed against measurable indicators such as women’s political representation, ownership of land and financial assets, access to economic opportunities, protection from gender-based violence, and other sex-disaggregated development outcomes. Member States are expected to collect harmonised data, submit national progress reports, undergo continental validation, and participate in peer review through the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM).

The more I read, the more I realised that Africa’s challenge is not that we do not know what to measure. We do. The real question is whether countries like Nigeria have built domestic systems capable of responding to those measurements.

While policies and strategies exist, enforcement remains weak. International assessments consistently show that Nigeria performs better on having gender-related laws and policy frameworks than on building the institutions responsible for implementing them. Women’s representation in elected office remains far below the ambitions of Agenda 2063. Administrative data are inconsistently collected across states and local governments. Gender programmes are frequently underfunded, and in many cases progress cannot even be verified because the underlying data simply do not exist.

The more I reflected on this, the more I became convinced that Nigeria has largely approached Agenda 2063 as a reporting obligation rather than a management system. Countries that perform well do not wait until reporting season to think about gender equality. They build institutions that generate progress every day, with evidence emerging naturally as a by-product of implementation. That shift from reporting to responsiveness is where I believe Nigeria’s greatest opportunity lies.

1. Translate continental indicators into institutional responsibilities
Every indicator under Goal 17 should have a clearly identified institutional owner within Nigeria.

Take women’s land ownership. Improving this indicator cannot simply become another performance target for state land agencies. Nigeria’s land administration is constrained by the Land Use Act, customary inheritance systems, and, in some regions, religious legal frameworks. Progress will therefore require coordinated legal reform, stronger enforcement of existing protections, and sustained engagement with traditional institutions alongside improvements in land administration.

The same principle applies elsewhere. Women’s financial inclusion should sit within the mandates of financial regulators and financial institutions. Reducing gender-based violence should become a justice and public safety outcome shared across policing, health, justice, and social protection systems.

2. Build a national gender data architecture
One of the greatest barriers to implementation is the absence of reliable administrative data. Nigeria needs an integrated gender data system that connects the National Bureau of Statistics with ministries, departments, agencies, state governments, and local government authorities through a common reporting architecture.

Without credible, sex-disaggregated data, policymakers cannot identify where women are being left behind, allocate resources effectively, or demonstrate progress to continental institutions.

But data collection itself also needs incentives. If gender reporting remains an additional administrative task with no influence on institutional performance, it will remain inconsistent. Progress is more likely when the quality of gender data is reflected in institutional assessments, senior management performance, and the budget approval process.

3. Connect financing to measurable outcomes
Many gender strategies do not fail because they lack good intentions. Every ministry, department, and agency should identify which Agenda 2063 indicators fall within its mandate and demonstrate how its budget contributes to measurable outcomes. But this conversation must also acknowledge Nigeria’s current fiscal realities. With increasing pressure on public finances, gender-responsive implementation cannot rely solely on government expenditure.

This creates an opportunity to leverage development financing, results-based funding, philanthropic partnerships, and public-private partnerships that already support gender equality, financial inclusion, digital access, education, and health. Nigeria can use the Agenda 2063 framework to better coordinate and attract investments that are already flowing into these sectors.

Ultimately, budgets should not only tell us how much money was spent. They should tell us what changed. How many accessed finance? How many girls remained in school? How many women entered leadership? Those are the outcomes that matter.

4. Strengthen implementation where women actually live
Nigeria cannot improve its continental performance without strengthening the capacity of states and local governments to deliver gender-responsive services and generate accurate administrative data. National ambitions will always depend on local institutions. Most Goal 17 indicators are produced long before they appear in national reports. Girls attend neighbourhood schools. Women receive care in primary healthcare centres. Land administration takes place largely within states. Cases of gender-based violence are handled through local justice systems. Economic opportunities are created within communities.

5. Create a Nigerian Gender Scorecard
The African Union already publishes continental scorecards. Nigeria should build on this by publishing its own Gender Equality Scorecard, comparing the performance of every state against the indicators contained in Goal 17. Imagine if governors, commissioners, legislators, development partners, civil society organisations, researchers, and citizens could see in one place which states were improving women’s access to finance, expanding land rights, reducing child marriage, strengthening political participation, and responding to gender-based violence. One lesson from development is remarkably consistent: what gets measured gets discussed, what gets discussed gets managed, and what gets managed is far more likely to improve.

6. Move from ministerial ownership to whole-of-government ownership
Perhaps the biggest institutional mistake is treating gender equality as the responsibility of one ministry. Agenda 2063 does not approach gender equality as a standalone social programme. It recognises that it cuts across governance, justice, finance, education, health, agriculture, labour, digital transformation, and economic development. That means every ministry has a role.The Ministry responsible for Women Affairs should remain the national champion and coordinator. But implementation must extend far beyond one institution. Finance, Budget and Economic Planning, Justice, Agriculture, Health, Education, ICT, Labour, Interior, state governments, and local governments all influence whether Goal 17 succeeds or fails.

Beyond Reporting
Agenda 2063 is often criticised because the African Union has limited enforcement powers. That criticism is fair. But perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. The real value of Agenda 2063 is not that it can compel governments to act. It is that it already provides a shared language, measurable indicators, and a continental accountability framework.

Nigeria’s challenge is therefore less about producing another strategy document and more about building institutions capable of responding to what those indicators reveal. Ultimately, our success will not be measured by the number of reports we submit to the African Union.

It will be measured by whether more Nigerian women own land, access finance, participate in leadership, live free from violence, and enjoy greater economic opportunity than they do today. That, after all, is what Agenda 2063 was always trying to measure.