The average Nigerian woman spends at least 4.3 hours on care work daily, while men spend about 1.12 hours. Women provide 3x more care and domestic work, effectively working a second full-time job uncompensated and uncounted in GDP.
Why This Matters:
Investing in childcare, eldercare, and home-based services could create one of Nigeria’s largest employment booms, estimated at 17 million jobs.
- Young Nigerians entering care professions can reshape perceptions of low-value work into essential economic infrastructure.
State of Play
- In Nigeria, caregiving is still largely viewed as a woman’s duty. When a relative falls ill or grows old, it’s usually the women in the family who leave work, stay in hospitals, and manage daily care, unpaid and uncounted.
Zoom In: If women’s unpaid work were assigned a monetary value, it would constitute between 10% and 39% of Nigeria’s GDP. That is between $28.5 billion and $111 billion, which is 8 times larger than the oil sector contribution (4.05%) and nearly 3 times the entire 2025 federal budget ($38 billion) at the upper estimate. Essentially, women do 3x more economic work than the entire government spends.
Bottomline
The care economy is an untapped source of opportunities for job creation, income generation, and social mobility. Formalising paid care work with fair wages, benefits, and regulated hours improves workers working conditions, empowers women and workers, enhances wellbeing and provides social protection.