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Leading with our humanity: A powerful case for rethinking development in Nigeria – EnviroNews
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There is a question that sits quietly beneath almost every development intervention: who is development really for? What if the biggest weakness in development programming is not a shortage of money, policies or expertise, but a failure to see the people whom development is supposed to serve?
These are deceptively simple questions. Yet, in a country as complex and unequal as Nigeria, the answers can determine whether a policy transforms lives or merely produces another impressive report.
Amina A. Salihu’s Leading with Our Humanity: Elevating Communities through Gender Equity and Social Inclusion confronts this question directly. The 2026 book, developed from the author’s Learning and Leadership Opportunity at the MacArthur Foundation and her reflections from the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), examines what happens when development programming deliberately places people, dignity, equity and inclusion at its centre.
The book draws extensively from the experience of the MacArthur Foundation’s On Nigeria Programme and its decision to place Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) at the heart of its interpretation of the Foundation’s “Just Imperative.” It is part institutional reflection, part development manual and part social commentary. More importantly, it is a challenge to policymakers, philanthropists, civil society organizations and development practitioners to reconsider what it means to work for – and with – communities.
At the heart of Salihu’s argument is a simple proposition: development cannot be just if it is not inclusive. Nigeria provides a particularly compelling setting for this argument. We live in a country where access to opportunity is profoundly shaped by gender, geography, poverty, age, disability and proximity to power. Two Nigerians may possess the same constitutional rights and yet have radically different possibilities in education, healthcare, employment, political participation and economic advancement.
Hence, the book is not simply about gender; It is about power. It is about who has access to opportunity, who is heard, who makes decisions, who benefits from resources and, perhaps most importantly, who gets left behind.
The significance of the book is immediately reinforced by its foreword, written by Liberian Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah R. Gbowee; who begins with a powerful proposition: “true power lies in enabling more people to do more, be better, and go further.”
That sentence provides an excellent entry point into Salihu’s argument. For Gbowee, leadership is not primarily about occupying a position of power. It is about using power to create the conditions in which other people can exercise their own agency. She draws an important distinction between being physically present and actually making a difference. As she puts it, “‘present’ does not mean ‘presence’.” Real presence, she argues, is demonstrated by how we listen, learn and translate that learning into action – while allowing those most affected by a problem to lead the response.
This is perhaps the book’s central philosophy. Development should not be something done to communities. It should increasingly be something designed and implemented with them.
Gbowee’s own personal history gives the argument emotional force. Recalling witnessing domestic abuse as a child in Monrovia, she describes her determination to become financially independent and never be at another person’s mercy. That childhood experience eventually became part of her life’s mission to help young women escape cycles of exploitation, discrimination and abuse.
It explains why she concludes her foreword with a simple but profound call: “we all must lead with our humanity wherever we may be.”
From equality to equity
At the heart of Salihu’s book is Gender Equity and Social Inclusion – GESI. The distinction between equity and equality is crucial. The book argues that equality represents the desired destination, while equity is the pathway for getting there. People do not begin from the same position, possess the same resources or face the same barriers. Therefore, giving everybody exactly the same thing does not necessarily produce justice.
The GESI consequently becomes a framework for identifying and addressing structural disadvantage. Gender is only one dimension. Age, disability, geography, class, faith, language, displacement and other social circumstances intersect to determine whether a person is included or excluded. The book therefore challenges the temptation to treat categories of people as homogeneous.
A poor woman in a rural community does not experience exclusion in exactly the same way as an educated woman in an urban centre. A young person with a disability does not face precisely the same barriers as an elderly person living alone. A conflict-displaced family does not experience government services in the same way as a politically connected urban household.
The lesson is straightforward: if development does not understand these differences, it can unintentionally reproduce the inequalities it seeks to solve. Salihu’s reflections, rooted in the experience of the MacArthur Foundation’s Just Imperative – the belief that justice must shape not only what an organization does but also how it works – describes a culture in which grant decisions were subjected to debate, reflection, ecosystem analysis and consideration of how resources could improve the quality of life of poor Nigerians.
Care, mutual respect and thoughtful communication were treated not as soft extras but as essential elements of effective development practice. This produces one of the book’s most important propositions: Development organizations must examine themselves before attempting to transform others. Hence the lesson that “GESI begins from within.” Organizations must look at their own leadership, staffing, decision-making, policies and culture. Inclusion cannot credibly be demanded externally if it is absent internally.
Listening to the people who are easy to overlook
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its willingness to acknowledge its own blind spots. The author argues that one can never confidently declare that a programme is “inclusive enough.” New voices and overlooked communities continually emerge. In reflecting on the On Nigeria experience, she identifies categories that had received insufficient attention, including caregivers, older people, people in hard-to-reach communities and certain groups affected by geography, class and conflict.
This humility is important. The book does not present GESI as a finished formula. Instead, it presents inclusion as a continuing process of asking difficult questions: Who is missing? Who has not been heard? Who benefits? Who carries the burden? Whose reality is absent from our data? The answer can change from one community to another and from one intervention to another.
That is why the author insists that learning must be treated as a value. If organizations assume they already know everything, they become rigid. If they remain willing to question their assumptions, they remain capable of adaptation.
Beyond the power of the purse
Another powerful lesson is that philanthropy and development institutions should not rely solely on financial resources to exercise influence. One of the book’s lessons is that organizations should “lead with the power of our philosophy and not the power of our purse.”
The implication is profound. A donor should not create dependency by assuming that money automatically creates wisdom. Communities and grantee organizations often possess knowledge, networks and experience that external funders do not. The role of the funder, therefore, should increasingly be to amplify existing agency, strengthen institutions, facilitate collaboration and create space for local actors to lead.
This is also why the book places considerable emphasis on collaboration, cohort approaches, knowledge-sharing and peer learning. And on the same hand beams its searchlight on data, which it argues must become a tool for inclusion. Without disaggregated, locally grounded and timely information, exclusion remains difficult to see.
The author argues that investment in local research, technology and data systems can help organizations understand the experiences of disadvantaged groups and design more responsive interventions. This is particularly relevant to Nigeria, where national averages can conceal enormous differences between communities. A national statistic may tell us what is happening in Nigeria. It does not necessarily tell us what is happening to a poor woman in a remote settlement, an elderly person without family support, a person with a disability, a displaced family or a child in an underserved community. Good data therefore becomes an instrument of justice.
The dignity of those who care
The book’s attention to caregivers and sign-language interpreters is another example of its expansive understanding of inclusion. Caregivers are often invisible because they are not the formal beneficiaries of a programme. Yet their work enables others to participate in society. Similarly, the book makes the case that sign-language interpretation is an access-enabling service that protects dignity, autonomy and participation for Deaf people.
This expands the meaning of GESI beyond conventional categories. Inclusion is not simply about counting beneficiaries. It is about identifying the networks of support that make participation possible. On the same hand, perhaps one of the book’s most important interventions is its insistence that development must not become excessively youth-centric.
Nigeria’s young population rightly demands attention, but the author warns that older citizens can disappear from development planning. The recommendations therefore include intergenerational mentoring, age-friendly infrastructure, stronger geriatric healthcare, social protection, community care, time-banking and programmes that connect younger and older generations.
The underlying principle is simple: Nobody should become invisible because they are outside the dominant demographic narrative.
A whole-of-society agenda
The book is also realistic about the limits of legislation. Law is necessary, but it is insufficient, it seems to assert. Even after legislation is enacted, it requires monitoring, review and implementation. The author therefore calls for post-legislative scrutiny and participatory approaches that involve the communities affected by laws and policies. This is particularly relevant to Nigeria’s governance experience, where the existence of a law does not always guarantee its enforcement. Justice requires institutions capable of translating legal rights into lived realities.
One of the most mature lessons in the book concerns how development organizations leave communities when programmes end. The author argues that “the way we leave the field is as important as what we fund.” This challenges the traditional project cycle in which a donor arrives, funds a programme, measures outputs and then leaves. Responsible exit should instead protect relationships, preserve knowledge, strengthen networks and help local institutions continue the work. In other words, sustainability is not merely a budget line. It is a relationship.
Indeed, the book’s recommendations extend beyond philanthropy. It calls on development partners to strengthen intergenerational inclusion and age-friendly infrastructure; programme teams to build GESI into design, onboarding, data and learning; governments to strengthen inclusive education, sign-language access, pensions and policy review; and donors and grant seekers to integrate intersectionality and class analysis into programme design.
It also calls for broader collaboration among government, civil society and development partners to improve elderly care, social protection, rural healthcare and intergenerational support. The book therefore ultimately moves beyond the language of “beneficiaries”. It speaks instead about citizens, partners, communities and co-creators of change.
A philosophy for Nigeria’s development
The greatest strength of Leading with Our Humanity may be that it refuses to separate development from humanity. Its final conclusion is deliberately modest: GESI is a work in progress. There will always be new challenges, new exclusions and new lessons. What is required is flexibility, adaptability, intentionality and continuous learning.
That message deserves wider attention in Nigeria. For a country struggling with poverty, inequality, insecurity, exclusion, weak institutions and declining trust, development cannot simply be about infrastructure, budgets and economic indicators. It must also be about dignity.
It must ask whether women have meaningful opportunities, whether persons with disabilities can participate fully, whether older citizens are protected, whether young people have voice, whether rural and hard-to-reach communities matter, and whether the people most affected by decisions have any meaningful role in making them.
That is where the book’s title becomes more than a slogan, and its 333 pages more than a literature. Leading with our humanity is a governance philosophy. It means understanding that the person at the receiving end of a policy is not a statistic. The woman excluded from decision-making is not merely a “gender category.” The elderly person without support is not an inconvenient demographic. The person with a disability is not an object of charity. They are citizens.
Certainly, citizens should not merely receive development; they should help define it. Perhaps that is why Leymah Gbowee’s words resonate so strongly with the entire volume. True leadership, she reminds us, is not demonstrated by how much power we possess, but by what that power enables others to become. In a world where power is too often used to protect privilege, Leading with Our Humanity offers another possibility: power as service, inclusion as justice, learning as leadership and dignity as the ultimate measure of development. And that is a conversation Nigeria urgently needs.
By Hamzat Lawal
Hamzat Lawal (Hamzy!) is a campaigner, scholar and founder of Africa’s leading civic organizations, Connected Development (CODE) and Follow The Money
