Nigeria’s 2020 National Action Plan on Gender and Climate Change (NAPGCC) sets out an ambitious framework for embedding gender equity at the centre of the country’s climate response. This review examines the plan’s background, strategic priorities, institutional design, and implementation gaps, and assesses what it would take for the plan to deliver real outcomes for women, youth, and other vulnerable groups on the ground.
Background and Purpose
The NAPGCC emerged from a recognition that climate change and gender inequality are structurally intertwined crises in Nigeria. Women are most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, and gender inequality has further exacerbated these impacts. The plan was formally initiated following a two-day National Stakeholders Consultative Workshop on Gender and Climate Change held in July 2016, organised by the Federal Ministry of Environment through the Department of Climate Change, with support from the Women Environmental Programme (WEP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Its development spanned over 36 months, influenced partly by the adoption of the International Gender Action Plan by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2017.
The core problems the plan seeks to address are both structural and practical. Despite increased awareness of gender mainstreaming, there exist significant disparities between men and women in the socio-economic and socio-political sphere. The National Bureau of Statistics recorded a 59.3% literacy level for women compared to 70.9% for men, and women employees in the civil service stood at 38.16% compared to 68.84% for men in 2016. Men constituted 94.71% of the National Parliament from 1999 to 2015. These inequalities are not incidental; they directly undermine women’s capacity to respond to climate change and to influence the policies that most affect them.
The plan explicitly aligns with Nigeria’s international commitments. It focuses on effective strategies for integrating gender into the implementation of national climate change initiatives, including the Paris Agreement and the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). It also draws on a range of national policy frameworks, including the National Adaptation Strategy and Plan of Action for Climate Change in Nigeria (NASPA-CCN 2011), the Nigeria Climate Change Policy Response and Strategy (2012), the National Agricultural Resilience Framework (2014), the Agriculture Promotion Policy (2016), and the National Gender Policy 2006 (revised 2015).
Nigeria’s climate vulnerability provides the urgent backdrop to this plan. The country currently faces serious climate change-related environmental security problems including landslides, erosion, desertification, drought, and heat waves, all of which combine to cause stress on natural resources such as land, water, and forests, and in turn affect the livelihoods of communities especially farmers, poor households and families dependent on natural resources for survival. These pressures fall disproportionately on women. According to the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, women account for 75% of the farming population in Nigeria, yet they remain largely excluded from the decision-making processes that shape agricultural and environmental policy.
Key Pillars or Priority Areas
The NAPGCC organises its action framework around five priority sectors, selected for their centrality to both climate vulnerability and gender inequality in Nigeria.
Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Use is the plan’s most expansive sector. Women constitute a substantial part of the agricultural labour force at 75%, in a sector largely characterized by smallholder farmers that mostly cultivate rain-fed farms. The plan targets institutional capacity building, gender-responsive budgeting, infrastructure improvement, and, critically, advocacy and sensitisation with traditional and religious leaders to support women’s right to land ownership, with the stated outcome of increased access to land by women. Land ownership is both an adaptation strategy and a justice issue: without it, women cannot make long-term investments in climate-resilient farming.
Food Security and Health recognises the cascading relationship between climate disruption and nutritional outcomes. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development projects that demand for staple food will increase by more than 50% as a result of growing population, effects of climate change, and structural challenges. The plan calls for gender-sensitive health policy updates, expanded mobile health services in hard-to-reach communities, and improved disease surveillance systems led by women community health workers.
Energy and Transport addresses the gendered burden of Nigeria’s energy crisis. The gendered division of labour usually means that women are responsible for most domestic tasks, and subsequently women and children are worst affected by health impacts from smoke inhalation with firewood or charcoal for cooking. In transport, overcrowding on public transport involves invasion of personal space that many find distressing and which renders women vulnerable to sexual abuse. The plan calls for diversification of energy supply, enrollment of women in energy technology training, and gender-sensitive revisions of transport policy.
Waste Management highlights women’s disproportionate exposure to household and community waste. Women are key managers of household waste and cleanliness, and poor waste management endangers women and their children. Women’s exposure to harmful waste threatens their reproductive health and that of their unborn babies. Action steps include capacity building for waste management agencies, community awareness campaigns, and access to finance for women in waste recycling businesses.
Water and Sanitation addresses one of the most acutely gendered dimensions of climate change in Nigeria. Climate change is further exacerbating the water and sanitation challenges experienced in Nigeria and this is placing more burden on women as they go farther distances to access water. The plan targets technical training for women in water management, infrastructure rehabilitation, and community-based sanitation programs.
Together, these five sectors constitute an integrated adaptation agenda. Mitigation elements, particularly in energy and waste, are also present but secondary to the plan’s dominant focus on building climate resilience for vulnerable populations.
Institutional Arrangements
The NAPGCC distributes implementation responsibility across a broad network of federal and state institutions. The Federal Ministry of Environment is designated the National Focal Point for the implementation of the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, a responsibility executed by its Department of Climate Change, which was established by a Presidential directive in 2007 to undertake and coordinate the national implementation of the Convention and Kyoto Protocol activities in Nigeria.
Other key institutions named across the plan’s sectoral matrices include Federal and State Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, Women Affairs, Health, Finance, Education, Water Resources, Transport, and Budget and National Planning. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), academia, and research institutions are also designated as responsible partners across multiple sectors.
The monitoring and evaluation of the plan is to be coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Environment together with the internal monitoring and evaluation systems of the responsible institutions and partners, including civil society.
While the plan names numerous institutions across its sectoral matrices, it does not establish a dedicated inter-ministerial coordinating body or a lead secretariat with sole accountability for implementation outcomes. This structural gap, examined further in the Gaps and Opportunities section, carries significant risk for a plan that depends on simultaneous action across multiple ministries.
Targets and Commitments
The NAPGCC covers the period 2020 to 2025, with action steps divided into two implementation phases: 2020 to 2022 and 2023 to 2025. The plan’s overarching goal is to ensure that national climate change processes in Nigeria mainstream gender considerations to guarantee inclusivity of all demographics in the formulation and implementation of climate change initiatives, programs, and policies.
Specific objectives include increasing women’s participation in climate governance, establishing a gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation system for sex-disaggregated data, promoting gender-responsive budgeting, and mobilising climate finance for gender-sensitive adaptation initiatives. In relation to Nigeria’s NDC commitments, Nigeria’s main target is a 20% unconditional and 45% conditional greenhouse gas emission reduction by 2030. The NAPGCC is positioned as a gender mainstreaming instrument in service of these broader national climate targets.
Sector-specific commitments are operationalised through detailed action plan matrices for each of the five priority sectors, with indicators, responsible institutions, and expected outcomes specified for each phase.
Implementation Strategy
The plan adopts a multi-stakeholder implementation model. Implementation will be governed by participatory research involving the government at all levels, academic and research institutions, CSOs (particularly women and youth groups), the private sector and other non-state actors, as well as development partners.
On financing, funds to implement the plan are to be sourced from national and state budgets, the private sector, CSOs, and global finance agencies such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and Adaptation Funds, as well as development partners including UNDP, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank. The plan also calls for gender-responsive budgeting at the institutional level, with dedicated action steps for training budgeting officers across ministries.
Subnational implementation is embedded in the plan’s design. The plan is intended to serve as a guide for states and local governments in mainstreaming gender concerns to address climate change challenges in Nigeria. It is to be socialised through Climate Change desk offices in states and subsequently cascaded to local communities.
Strengths of the Policy
° Strong international and domestic legal grounding. The NAPGCC draws on a robust legal architecture, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which Nigeria ratified on 23rd August 1984, committing to implement all appropriate measures, including legislation and temporary special measures, to ensure that women’s human rights and fundamental freedoms are protected. It also draws on the Maputo Protocol, the Nigerian Constitution, and Nigeria’s NDCs, giving the plan both international legitimacy and domestic legal backing.
° Broad stakeholder consultation process. The plan was developed over 36 months through multiple rounds of national and subnational consultation. Both ENDS, under its Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action (GAGGA) programme, supported stakeholder consultations in all six geo-political zones of Nigeria. This breadth of participation strengthens the plan’s legitimacy and its sensitivity to regional variation. The deeper question, however, is whether that consultation translated into sustained ownership. Consultation during design does not guarantee that the same stakeholders were retained as accountable partners during implementation, and the plan does not specify how the groups consulted in 2016 to 2019 would remain engaged in delivery and monitoring through to 2025.
° Sector-specific action matrices. Each of the five priority sectors is accompanied by a detailed action plan matrix specifying objectives, phased action steps, performance indicators, responsible institutions, and expected outcomes. This structure offers a usable implementation roadmap for line ministries and partners, distinguishing the NAPGCC from vague policy statements. Whether these matrices were ever activated, particularly given that the first implementation phase (2020 to 2022) has now closed, is a question the document does not answer, and one that a follow-up review should urgently address.
° Explicit attention to land rights. The plan’s inclusion of land ownership advocacy for women in the agriculture sector is a notable strength. Access to land is foundational to women’s agricultural resilience, and the plan’s engagement with traditional and religious leaders reflects an awareness of cultural barriers that purely technical plans often ignore. Yet advocacy and sensitisation are soft instruments. The plan stops short of proposing reform to the statutory framework that governs land tenure, notably the Land Use Act of 1978, under which control of land is vested in state governors. Without complementary legal reform, sensitisation alone is unlikely to dislodge the entrenched customary and statutory barriers that keep land out of women’s hands.
° Cross-sectoral gender mainstreaming framework. Rather than treating gender as a standalone women’s issue, the NAPGCC embeds gender considerations across all five sectors, in line with the formal definition of gender mainstreaming adopted in the document. Gender mainstreaming is described as the integration of the gender perspective into every stage of the policy process, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, with a view to promoting equality between women and men. This architecture, if implemented, has the potential to reshape how multiple ministries approach their core mandates.
° Explicit youth recognition. The plan formally names youth as a vulnerable group and as agents of change, and includes youth representation in several of its stakeholder categories. This is a stronger foundation than many comparable policy documents provide. The recognition is largely nominal, however. Naming youth in a goal statement and a stakeholder list is not the same as giving them a defined role, and the plan provides no youth-specific action steps, no dedicated monitoring role, and no funding pathway, a shortfall examined more fully in the Gaps and Opportunities section.
° Alignment with the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC Gender Action Plan. The NAPGCC is explicitly positioned as an instrument for implementing Nigeria’s gender-related obligations under the Paris Agreement, providing a direct link between national policy and international climate architecture.
Gaps and Opportunities
Monitoring and Evaluation: Output indicators without outcome measures. The plan correctly identifies the need for a gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation framework, but the indicators listed in the sectoral matrices are almost entirely output-based: number of persons trained, number of policies reviewed, number of awareness campaigns launched. Not a single indicator measures whether women’s climate resilience actually improved, whether gender gaps in land ownership narrowed, or whether female participation in climate governance increased. A monitoring and evaluation framework that cannot measure outcomes cannot determine whether the plan is working. Future iterations of the NAPGCC, or any mid-term review, should establish sex-disaggregated baseline data for each sector and define outcome-level indicators tied to those baselines.
Coordination: Dispersal of accountability. The plan assigns implementation responsibilities to a very large number of institutions simultaneously across each sector. In the Agriculture sector alone, responsible institutions span Federal and State Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, Environment, Women Affairs, Education, Finance, Lands and Housing, and Information, among others. When every institution is responsible, no institution is accountable. The plan does not designate a lead coordinator for any sector, nor does it establish a formal inter-ministerial oversight mechanism. This structural ambiguity is one of the most significant implementation risks the plan faces.
Financing: Aspirational without a financing plan. The plan lists potential sources of funding, including national budgets, the GCF, the GEF, UNDP, and the World Bank, but does not specify financing amounts, allocation mechanisms, or accountability structures for how funds will be tracked. Gender-responsive budgeting is listed as an action step, but without a baseline assessment of current budget allocations or enforceable targets, this commitment remains aspirational.
Youth Inclusion: Present but underoperationalised. Youth are named in the plan’s goal statement and in several stakeholder lists, but they do not have a dedicated section, a defined role in implementation or monitoring, or any sector-specific action steps tailored to their participation. This is a meaningful gap. Young Nigerians, particularly young women, are simultaneously among the most climate-vulnerable and the most civically engaged demographic in the country. Stronger youth integration could include:
- Youth representation on any inter-ministerial coordinating body established for the NAPGCC.
- Youth-led community monitoring of sectoral action plan matrices.
- Dedicated funding pathways for youth-led climate adaptation initiatives, particularly in agriculture and water management.
- Formal partnership with Nigeria’s youth climate networks to support subnational implementation.
Private Sector Engagement: Identified but underdeveloped. The plan names the private sector as a funding source and a partner institution across several sectors, but does not specify what private sector engagement would look like in practice, what incentive structures would draw private actors in, or how their contributions would be tracked. Given that public financing alone is unlikely to be sufficient for a plan of this ambition, the private sector gap is as consequential as the financing gap it sits beside. A stronger private sector strategy could include:
- Green finance instruments tailored to women’s adaptation enterprises, such as gender-lens investing vehicles and green bonds that channel capital into women-led climate ventures.
- Public-private partnerships for clean energy and water infrastructure in underserved communities, structured so that women are both beneficiaries and operators rather than passive recipients.
- Incentive structures, such as tax relief, matching grants, or first-loss guarantees, to draw private capital into women-led enterprises in agriculture, waste recycling, and clean cooking.
- A disclosure and tracking mechanism so that private sector contributions are reported against the plan’s targets, rather than counted as an unmeasured aspiration.
Timeline: The implementation window has now closed. The NAPGCC covered the period 2020 to 2025, and as of 2026 its full implementation period has elapsed. The document itself does not reference a review mechanism, a successor plan, or any provisions for assessing implementation progress at the end of the five-year cycle. There has, however, been movement outside the document. In March 2026, the Women Environmental Programme, in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Environment, convened a National Conference on Gender and Climate Change in Abuja to review the NAPGCC, assess progress, and identify next steps, with stakeholders calling for a second-generation plan, a so-called NAPGCC 2.0, to be drafted and implemented. Yet as of mid-2026, no formal implementation review or successor plan has been officially published. A comprehensive evaluation of what the NAPGCC actually delivered, and the swift development of its successor, is now overdue.
Concluding Statement
The NAPGCC represents a serious and structurally ambitious attempt to centre gender equity in Nigeria’s national climate response, grounded in strong legal frameworks and broad stakeholder consultation. Its most significant risks, namely diffuse institutional accountability, output-only monitoring indicators, and the absence of a dedicated financing plan, are precisely the gaps that could cause an otherwise well-designed policy to expire as a document on a shelf rather than drive measurable change on the ground. With the plan’s implementation window now closed and a review process beginning to take shape, the most urgent priority is a comprehensive evaluation of what was actually delivered, and the development of a second-generation action plan that learns from both the NAPGCC’s strengths and its structural limitations.
Glossary of Key Terms
CEDAW: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
CSO: Civil Society Organisation
GAGGA: Global Alliance for Green and Gender Action
GCF: Green Climate Fund
GEF: Global Environment Facility
NAPGCC: National Action Plan on Gender and Climate Change
NASPA-CCN: National Adaptation Strategy and Plan of Action for Climate Change in Nigeria
NDC: Nationally Determined Contribution
UNDP: United Nations Development Programme
UNFCCC: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
WEP: Women Environmental Programme
Author’s Bio
Ukachi Chidalu Alexandria is a public health student of Federal University of Technology Owerri with a specialisation in health systems and environmental health. Her work sits at the intersection of climate change, population health, and data: fields she believes are inseparable in the African context. She volunteers with the Alliance for Sustainability Education and writes to make climate science and policy legible to the next generation of African advocates and decision-makers.
