SEATS. STAKES. SPEND. We have counted the seats for twenty years. Nobody has counted the spend. For four Wednesdays I have asked the same question in different ways. Where are the banks owned by women. Where are the listed businesses built by women. Where are the buildings owned by women. I could not answer any of them properly, and the reason was always the same. Nobody was counting.
Something shifted while I was writing. Arese Ugwu has been appointed Acting Managing Director and Chief Executive of NASD Plc, Nigeria’s alternative securities exchange, subject to confirmation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I am making a point of this one, not because a woman has a title but because of where she now sits, at an institution close to how growing Nigerian companies raise money, after years spent teaching ordinary people to understand money in language they could follow.
When I asked her about the data, she confirmed what I had suspected all month. No comprehensive dataset exists identifying female founders or tracking founder ownership over time. There is company registration data at the Corporate Affairs Commission, but not the ownership picture I was looking for. And then she said the thing I had waited all month to hear from anyone inside the system: that it should be built.
What comes after the capital Something else happened that I did not anticipate. Women wrote to me, and not to agree. A lender scaling serious capital into the hands of women in business. A founder who read the column on listed companies and recognised her own ambition in it. Several building quietly and wanting to know what the next level requires. None were asking whether capital matters.
They were asking what comes after it. For a month I have been asking women to climb. Own more. Build vehicles. Think bigger. All of it addressed to the people already working hardest. A business does not reach scale on encouragement. It reaches scale on revenue. And in this economy, revenue at scale comes from a small number of places. The procurement budgets of the banks, the telcos, the oil and gas majors, mining, power, the large manufacturers, and government.
That is where serious money moves, in contracts that run for years and turn a good business into a bankable one. So here is the question I have not seen asked in Nigeria. What proportion of large corporate and government spend goes to businesses owned by women? We count women in employment, in management, on boards. We have built an architecture of measurement around who sits where, and almost nothing around who wins the work.
The list I could not finish Some weeks ago I set out to make what I assumed would be a straightforward list: one hundred Nigerian businesses owned by women at serious revenue scale. A hundred companies with real turnover. Thousands of names at the smaller end came easily. Climbing from there was another matter, and I was not asking for private financial information. I was trying to identify which companies existed.
I could not finish the list. There is a category we routinely overlook. A woman running a restaurant, a nail studio or a braiding business across several locations, with staff and systems, is not running an informal enterprise. She is running structured commerce, in sectors nobody thinks to count. Then the ones already at scale and largely invisible. The manufacturer supplying products you use weekly.
The services firm with hundreds on its payroll. The energy business. The schools group. The beauty brand that crossed three borders quietly. And, since this series began with banks, businesses and buildings, the women developing property at scale, hardest of all to find. They exist. I could not count them. So perhaps the starting point is not a national list but a sector at a time.
Who are the twenty women in property development capable of building at scale, and the twenty in manufacturing? The numbers that do exist The global figures are startling enough. Women participate in the ownership of roughly one in three firms worldwide. Yet only about one per cent of global public procurement spending is awarded to women-owned businesses. One per cent. Set those two side by side and the gap is not subtle.
It is the difference between being present in the economy and being paid by it. And for the large private buyers whose procurement budgets shape the rest of the market, I found no published figure at all. Not a small number. No number. That absence is not a gap in my research. It is the finding. Two problems, not one Counting matters. If large buyers published what they spend with women-owned businesses, the conversation would change within a year, because a published number is hard to defend and easy to move.
But counting can only tell us where contracts went. It cannot tell us how opportunity travels. Another of those conversations, with a woman who has built in health and in capital, made that point sharply. Look honestly at how the largest fortunes on this continent were built, she said, and you find something beyond intelligence and hard work. You find proximity. Many of the men we now call visionaries were running much smaller businesses before a particular door opened.
Someone suggested they apply for the licence. Someone thought of them when the contract came up. That is not cynicism. It is how large enterprises have always been built, everywhere, and pretending otherwise does women no favours. Women have been taught to network. Far fewer of us have been taught to treat relationships as business infrastructure. When you are out of people’s minds, you are out of their opportunities.
So there are two problems here, not one. Disclosure begins to address the first. The second is addressed by building rooms: not networking events, but deliberate architecture, placing women who run serious businesses in sustained proximity to the people who allocate contracts, capital and concessions, and to each other. That second problem is a longer conversation, and I intend to have it here over the coming weeks.
This week I want to stay with the first, because it has a deadline. Nigeria is not waiting Because here is what makes this urgent rather than merely interesting. Nigeria is not waiting for me, or anyone else, to suggest it. The Bureau of Public Procurement has developed a National Affirmative Procurement Policy, reported to take effect with the 2026 budget and to carry consequences for agencies that do not comply.
Kaduna State moved earlier, adopting a gender-responsive procurement policy that reserves a share of public contracts for women-owned businesses and waives registration fees for those that are wholly women-owned. This is not an imported idea looking for an African application. It is Nigerian policy, arriving now. Which makes two questions urgent rather than academic. The first is the baseline.
If the policy takes effect with this budget, what is it being measured against? In Colombia, women-led businesses made up more than half the supplier base in 2020 and received eighteen per cent of contract value. They could have that argument because they had the number. We are about to implement a policy without one. The second is the definition. As reported in this newspaper in February, qualifying businesses will be required to demonstrate at least fifty-one per cent ownership or operational control.
If that is the wording that survives into the final policy, it is worth pausing on one small word. Or. Ownership and operational control are two different things, and this series has been about the difference. Ownership means the equity is hers. Operational control can mean a male-owned company has appointed capable women to run it, which is worth having and is not the same thing at all.
Left as it stands, a policy designed to move ownership could be satisfied without moving any, and we would spend a decade counting the wrong thing. We asked for better definitions. We are close to getting one. It is worth getting right. The ask So the request is modest and uncomfortable, which is usually the sign of a real one. To the agencies now covered by the policy: publish the baseline before you implement against it, and the outturn each year afterwards.
A policy nobody can measure is a press release with a longer life. To every large private buyer, the banks, the telcos, the majors, the manufacturers, covered by no policy at all: count what you spend with businesses owned by women. Publish it in your annual report, beside the figures you already publish about your workforce and your board. Then decide, publicly, whether that number is good enough, and if it is not, set a target and report against it.
I am not beginning with a quota. I am beginning with transparency, of the kind you already practise on everything else you consider material. If the number embarrasses you, that is information. If nobody in your organisation can produce it at all, that is information too, and rather more damning. Not just seats We asked for seats and we got them. Women now sit in rooms my mother’s generation could not enter.
That was not nothing. But a seat lets you influence what is decided. A stake means you own what is built. And stakes are won in three places. Cap tables. Title deeds. Contracts. Contracts matter because revenue is what eventually buys the other two. So this week’s question is not for women at all. It is for every institution that has told us it is committed to women’s advancement, and for the agencies about to implement a policy none of us can yet measure.
Show us the spend. Related News Why Nigerian investors must look beyond share prices AIICO upgrades learning centre to deepen human capital development Trees, health and the economics of wellbeing Udo Maryanne Okonjo Udo Maryanne Okonjo is a board director, wealth strategist, and investor. As Executive Chair of Fine &Country West Africa and Founder of Radiant Collective Capital, she champions women-led wealth, Impact and Legacy across Africa and Beyond.
