Nigerian women urged to transform advocacy into actionable change and economic value

In Lagos last week, hundreds of Nigerian women gathered for a conference that posed a question beneath every speech: What comes after the talking?

The 10th Voice of Women Conference and Awards marked a decade of advocacy work by the Voice of Women Empowerment Foundation and Women Radio WFM 91.7. The event drew business leaders, government officials, and activists to discuss what the next ten years should hold. The consensus, delivered across multiple keynote addresses, was clear: platforms and voices matter, but only if they produce something concrete—businesses built, policies changed, systems shifted.

Folorunso Alakija, a businesswoman and philanthropist, opened the conversation by reflecting on what a decade of amplified women's voices had already accomplished. She argued that the foundation had proven the principle: when women get stages to speak from, things move. But she pushed the room forward. The next phase, she said, required women to ensure their voices actually counted for something measurable. Competence had to deliver results. Visibility had to have a purpose. Influence had to drive action. It was a call to move from being heard to being consequential.

Stella Okoli, who built Emzor Pharmaceutical Industries from the ground up, reinforced the economic dimension of that challenge. She told the conference that women needed to stop converting ideas into conversations and start converting them into enterprises. She spoke from her own trajectory—starting where you are, building steadily, expanding incrementally. Nigeria's economic development, she suggested, depended on women doing exactly this work: creating businesses, solving problems, generating value. It was not abstract. It was about GDP, jobs, and the material conditions of families and communities.

Noimot Salako-Oyedele, Deputy Governor of Ogun State, acknowledged progress. Women had moved into education, into business ownership, into public service. But she named the gaps that remained: economic opportunity was still constrained, healthcare access was uneven, leadership pipelines were thin, and governance remained male-dominated. She offered a phrase that circulated through the room: women should "lift as they rise." Mentorship mattered. But so did something harder—taking the conversations from conferences like this one and translating them into networks, partnerships, and sustained action.

Erelu Bisi Fayemi, former First Lady of Ekiti State, shifted the frame to something more intimate and more structural. She described what she called the "one-hour woman" culture—working women who rush home during their lunch breaks to cook, as though their value as professionals could be negated by their absence from the kitchen. She criticized the societal expectation that placed this burden on women alone, and she named what it cost: time, energy, the ability to rest or network or develop themselves during the workday. She went further. Boys, she said, needed to be raised differently—to understand mutual respect, to share household responsibilities, to become partners rather than dependents. The problem was not women's ambition. It was a culture that demanded women be two people at once.

The conference drew support from major financial institutions and airlines, and awards were given to individuals recognized for advancing women's empowerment. Stella Okoli received recognition, as did Olasupo Olusi of the Bank of Industry, Kafilat Ogbara from the House of Representatives, Ayodele Zubair of the Lagos Internal Revenue Service, and Olumide Omosebi. The awards were symbolic—a way of saying: these people are moving the needle. But the real work, the speakers suggested, belonged to everyone in the room and everyone listening beyond it. The question now was whether a decade of advocacy could become a decade of transformation.