What a village in Kano taught me about how Nigeria actually develops

Last month in Kano, at the state’s Rural and Sustainable Community Development Summit, someone told a story I have not stopped thinking about.

A team had gone out to a village to verify a complaint. There was no school there – 250 children with nowhere to learn. As the team was there – 250 metres away – the villagers ran after the car. ‘Wait,’ they said. If you are going to build us a school, you must also give us a primary health centre.

That community was not asking for two favours. They were telling us something: ‘Wait’, we in the development and business world keep forgetting. A hungry child cannot learn. A sick child cannot sit in a classroom. A girl who stays in school is far more likely to seek antenatal care, to vaccinate her children, and to marry at the right time. You cannot move one of these things without the other two coming along.

They live one life. We are the ones who split it into three.

We fund health here, education there, and women’s empowerment somewhere else. We put them under different ministries, different budgets, different donors, and different panels at different conferences. The people we serve never made those divisions. They have simply been waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

I have spent seventeen years working across Nigeria, and if the work has taught me anything, it is that this separation is not just untidy. It is expensive. When we run health, education and gender as three competing line items, each one underperforms, and we pay three times for outcomes we could have bought once. But when we invest in the same girl across all three, the return compounds. A naira spent keeping her in school comes back in her own health, in her children’s health, and eventually in her income. There is no higher-yielding investment in any rural development plan, and yet it is the one we most consistently fragment.

This matters for business, not only for government and NGOs, because the economics of integration are the economics of scale. A standalone clinic in a hard-to-reach ward is a cost centre. That same clinic, connected to power, to a local economy, to a school, to data that tells you who is being reached, becomes something closer to infrastructure  – something a serious investor can actually underwrite. Fragmented interventions ask for charity. Integrated systems attract capital.

We already have proof that the integrated, patent-pending approach works. Nigeria was certified free of the wild polio virus in 2020, and a great deal of that was coordinated not from a boardroom in Abuja but from an emergency operations centre in Kano, built years earlier and held steady through partnership and community trust. More recently, when solar power was brought to primary health centres in some of Kano’s hardest-to-reach wards, places that had never had reliable light or a working cold chain, attendance more than doubled within weeks. The demand was always there. The mothers were always ready. The system simply had to show up for them and then stay.

That word – ‘stay’ – is where I want to be honest and hopeful at the same time. Across Nigeria, the funding landscape is shifting under all of us. Donor money is thinner than it was, and it is not returning to where it once sat. I do not say this as a complaint, because inside that shift is an opportunity we have needed for a long time: the chance to build things that do not depend on a foreign cheque to survive. Locally owned. Locally driven. Designed for how our communities actually live, in our own languages, for our own conditions, rather than borrowed time: somewhere they were dropped in.

None of that happens by accident, and it does not happen through a single ceremony. A launch is not delivery. We have all watched beautiful plans unveiled to applause and then silently fade once the cameras leave. What makes the difference is whether the government genuinely owns the work, whether communities drive it, and whether partners build inside the system instead of running a path along the one beside it. Technology that sits inside government structures endures. Technology that runs alongside them is just a pilot with a good story.

And nothing in the north moves at all until you sit, first, with the traditional and religious leaders. They are not people to inform after the decision is made. They are the gateway to a community’s trust, and trust – not culture, not even money – is the real currency of development. When our royal fathers, our religious leaders and our mothers are treated as co-creators – not beneficiaries – trust, not money, endures. When they are not, they collapse, no matter how well they are funded.

So I do not believe health sits on its own panel. I do not think education or gender do either. It is one system, and what we actually need is one table – where government, communities, the programme sector, development partners and implementers stop optimising their own corners and start understanding one another’s priorities well enough to move together.

Kano is beginning to model exactly this, and it deserves real credit for the courage that takes. The question in front of all of us now is not whether the integrated model works. Our own history has already answered that. The question is whether we are willing to fund it, own it, and sustain it long after the launch – the way that village already understood, standing in the road, asking not for one thing, but for the whole of their one life to be seen.

About the author:

Ota Akhigbe is Director of Partnerships and Programmes at launch-theAfrica, where she leads collaborations with governments, donors and communities to strengthen health, education and gender systems across Nigeria and West Africa. She writes and speaks on partnership and sustainable development and champions an integrated approach that treats health, education and gender as one system rather than three.