Former First Lady of Ekiti State and prominent women's rights leader, Erelu Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi , delivered a compelling call to action at the recently concluded fifth annual Gender and Inclusion Summit (GIS), convened by the Policy Innovation Center (PIC).
Commending Dr. Osasuyi Dirisu, Executive Director of the PIC, and the organization’s leadership for an exemplary convening, Erelu Fayemi played a central role in the program by chairing the high-level Economic Inclusion session on the opening day and delivering the closing remarks at the Women in Leadership Breakfast meeting on Day 2.
Addressing stakeholders under this year’s theme, ‘From Agenda to Action: Making Innovations Count for the Last Mile,’ Erelu Fayemi challenged participants to confront an uncomfortable reality: Why does the economic empowerment gap between women and men continue to widen, or at best remain stubbornly persistent, despite numerous federal and sub-national interventions?
Erelu Fayemi emphasized that while various programs have been introduced over the years, innovation must target the underlying systems producing exclusion rather than simply helping women navigate a fundamentally unequal environment. She urged leaders to evaluate critical structural questions, including why women still possess less control over productive assets, why they remain underrepresented where economic decisions are made, what drives persistent barriers to finance, markets, and technology, and why unpaid care work is treated as invisible alongside discriminatory social norms.
"Unless we address these structural issues, we risk designing better programmes around fundamentally unequal systems. Innovation should not simply help women navigate inequality; it should help dismantle it," Erelu Fayemi stated.
Expanding on the intersections of society and economy, Erelu Fayemi stressed that a woman cannot be economically empowered in the marketplace while being denied basic personhood elsewhere. She forcefully argued that gender-based violence, unpaid care burdens, restrictive social norms, unequal household power dynamics, lack of property rights, and limits on mobility are not peripheral "gender issues", they are fundamental components of economic infrastructure. She noted that women cannot exercise economic agency where fear defines their daily lives, insisting that women's safety must be integrated directly into economic policy rather than treated as a separate social concern.
Concluding her engagements at the summit, Erelu Fayemi maintained that economic programs alone cannot transform women's lives. Sustainable progress requires stronger institutions, robust legal implementation, accountability systems, political representation, lifelong learning, and elevated women's leadership. She underscored that true institutional innovation requires the political will to make gains sustainable, concluding that ambition must be bigger than simply getting more women into the economy to build a society where women hold the rights, safety, resources, voice, and agency to determine their own terms of participation.
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