Nigerian women’s unpaid care burden and housing precarity lock them into home-based work: systemic barriers to economic autonomy
Original framing: “Working from home in Nigeria: study finds women don’t have much choice” — The Conversation - Global
Empirical studies (e.g., World Bank, 2020; UN Women, 2021) confirm that women’s home-based work in Nigeria is correlated with lower wages, lack of social protection, and higher rates of poverty compared to men in similar roles. Research on ‘time poverty’ (e.g., UNICEF, 2019) shows that Nigerian women spend 4x more time on unpaid care work than men, with housing insecurity exacerbating this burden. The ‘double burden’ of paid and unpaid labor is a well-documented phenomenon in feminist economics (Folbre, 2012).
The unpaid care burden and housing precarity faced by Nigerian women are not merely cultural or individual issues but the cumulative result of colonial land dispossession, neoliberal austerity, and patriarchal welfare gaps.
Indigenous frameworks like Yoruba ‘Aje’ and Igbo ‘Oha-na-Eze’ reveal how communal reciprocity once mitigated these burdens, while contemporary cooperatives like WRAPA and SEWA demonstrate how collective action can redistribute labor and resources. The trickster’s lens exposes the absurdity of framing ‘choice’ within a system that structurally excludes women from land, housing, and public infrastructure, turning what appears as constraint into a site of resistance. Solution pathways must therefore integrate land reform, cooperative formalisation, and care economy investment, while centring marginalised voices like rural women in the Niger Delta and female-headed households in Northern Nigeria. Without addressing these systemic roots, policy responses risk reinforcing the very structures that perpetuate gendered economic exclusion.