Yobe Backs Female Akara Sellers with N461m Support
Female food vendors who fry akara at roadside stalls across Yobe State are set to become the newest beneficiaries of a government empowerment drive, after the State Executive Council approved N460.83 million for the purchase of beans and cooking equipment to shore up their small trades.
The approval, reached at a council meeting presided over by Governor Mai Mala Buni at the Government House, Damaturu, on Thursday, was disclosed by the Commissioner for Home Affairs, Information and Culture, Abdullahi Bego, while briefing journalists after the session.
“The State Executive Council has approved the sum of N460,828,450.00 for the procurement of beans for distribution to female small business owners as empowerment support,” Bego said, adding that the beans would be handed out alongside cooking oil, smokeless stoves, cooking utensils and kitchenware already procured and warehoused by the Ministry of Wealth Creation, Empowerment and Employment Generation. According to him, a total of 1,780 bags of beans, each weighing 50 kilogrammes, will be shared among the beneficiaries.
Beans are the raw material for akara, the fried bean cake that anchors a large share of informal food commerce in northern Nigeria, and the inclusion of smokeless stoves signals a secondary health objective, given the respiratory risks long associated with open firewood cooking.
The commissioner said the package was designed to lift the earning capacity of women running micro enterprises. He described it as part of the Buni administration’s wider effort to improve the living conditions of women and strengthen small scale businesses across the state.
Beyond the food vendors, Bego said the council approved N364.48 million for the procurement of 1,000 Yamaha GX 390 grinding machines for distribution to residents under the state’s empowerment programme. “Under the Ministry of Wealth Creation, the council has approved the sum of N364,475,000.00 for the procurement of 1,000 Yamaha GX 390 grinding machines for empowerment support to people across the state,” he said.
The two interventions sit within a far larger spending package. Bego said the Executive Council approved projects and services worth N73.32 billion across critical sectors of the state economy. He listed N28.53 billion for agricultural tools and implements for the state’s 2026 mega agricultural empowerment programme, N23.97 billion for two major road projects, and further sums for housing, markets and other infrastructure.
The scale of the outlay reflects the depth of the challenge Yobe faces. The state ranks among the poorest in the federation. In the 2022 National Multidimensional Poverty Index, published by the National Bureau of Statistics in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, 83.5 percent of Yobe residents were classified as multidimensionally poor, placing it sixth on the list of Nigeria’s most deprived states, behind Sokoto at 90.5 percent, Bayelsa, Gombe, Jigawa and Plateau. Nationally, that survey found that 133 million Nigerians, roughly 63 percent of the population, were multidimensionally poor, with 65 percent of them, about 86 million people, living in the north.
Successive assessments have tied the North East’s high poverty readings to more than a decade of insurgency, mass displacement and disrupted farming, factors that have hit women and female headed households especially hard. Interventions targeted at women therefore carry weight beyond their naira value, because women dominate the informal trade that keeps many rural and peri urban households afloat.
The economic logic rests on the outsized role of micro enterprises in the Nigerian economy. The last joint survey by the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria and the National Bureau of Statistics put the number of micro, small and medium enterprises at about 39 million, accounting for 46.3 percent of gross domestic product, 87.9 percent of employment and 96.9 percent of all businesses. Yet women remain under represented in the formal end of that sector. Available data indicate that only about 23 percent of formally operated small and medium businesses in Nigeria are run by women, a gap widely attributed to limited access to credit, land and collateral.
Access to finance remains the binding constraint. Studies drawing on World Bank data have found that formal lending channels meet only around 18 percent of the credit needs of Nigerian MSMEs, pushing most operators toward personal savings and informal sources. Financial inclusion has improved but still trails official ambitions, reaching 64.1 percent of adults by 2024 against a Central Bank of Nigeria target of 95 percent, with women, rural dwellers and the north accounting for the widest exclusion gaps. It is against this backdrop that state governments have leaned on in kind empowerment schemes as a quicker route to reach citizens the banking system has not.
Yobe’s move mirrors a pattern spreading across northern states. Kano recently distributed working tools to about 1,900 butchers under a similar empowerment initiative, while several states have rolled out grinding machines, tricycles and starter packs in place of cash transfers. Supporters of the model argue that direct provision of productive assets shields beneficiaries from inflation and reduces diversion, since recipients receive equipment rather than money. Critics of asset based palliatives, on the other hand, have consistently questioned their long term impact, noting that one off distributions rarely address the structural gaps in credit, market access and skills that keep micro traders trapped in low earnings. Independent evaluations of such schemes across Nigerian states remain scarce, and the Yobe government has not published targets or a monitoring framework for measuring outcomes.
For now, the administration has framed the spending as evidence of its commitment to women and small businesses. Whether the beans, stoves and grinding machines translate into durable livelihoods, or fade as many past empowerment rounds have, will depend on follow through that goes beyond the point of distribution, an outcome the figures announced on Thursday cannot yet confirm.