The Federal Government and the Gates Foundation have called for stronger action to ensure that policies on gender inclusion, adolescent health and social development produce measurable improvements in people’s lives.
The call was made at the 2026 Gender and Inclusion Summit organised by the Policy Innovation Centre in Abuja.
Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare Iziaq Salako said harmful gender norms continued to restrict the health, safety, education and economic opportunities of young Nigerians.
He said social expectations around gender could reinforce discrimination and expose adolescents to violence, early pregnancy, mental-health challenges and poor health outcomes.
Salako said the government had introduced adolescent and school-health programmes, created a dedicated budget line for adolescent health and expanded access to sexual and reproductive-health services.
He also said more than 14 million girls aged nine to 14 had received the Human Papillomavirus vaccine under the national vaccination campaign.
The minister highlighted a new nationally representative survey examining gender norms, attitudes, health and wellbeing among adolescents.
He said the evidence would help shape policy across health, education, social protection and economic empowerment.
Gates Foundation Deputy Director for Policy, Advocacy and Communications in Nigeria Ekenem Isichei said the real test of policy was whether citizens actually received services and experienced better outcomes.
He argued that governments and development partners needed to move from commitments to execution, from simple access to meaningful inclusion and from pilot projects to systems capable of sustainable scale.
Isichei also warned that artificial intelligence and digital-finance systems could reproduce existing inequalities if women, young people, persons with disabilities and underserved communities were excluded from their design.
