Empowerment Paradox: Women as Primary Beneficiaries, Cooperative Builders, and Marginalised Recipients in a Nigerian Conditional Cash Transfer Programme

Abstract

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes across the Global South are predominantly designed around women as both primary recipients and agents of household welfare improvement. The assumption underpinning this design (that women’s preferential receipt of transfers will produce better household outcomes and simultaneously advance women’s economic empowerment), has been extensively debated in the gender and social protection literature. This article examines the gendered dimensions of the Household Uplifting Programme–Conditional Cash Transfer (HUP-CCT) in Plateau State, Nigeria (2016–2023), through an explanatory sequential mixed-methods analysis of survey data from 321 beneficiary households and nine Focus Group Discussions. Three interconnected findings are reported. First, a gender paradox is identified. Although women constitute 64.2% of HUP-CCT beneficiaries, female beneficiaries report marginally but significantly worse financial outcomes than male beneficiaries in the multivariate model (OR=1.21, p=0.041), even after controlling for programme duration, disability status, household size, LGA, and programme status. The bivariate comparison is non-significant (p=0.569), but the regression finding signals a marginal intra-household resource control constraint operating through gender-differentiated conversion factors. Second, and in productive tension with this finding, the study documents an original empowerment counter-narrative. The women’s cooperative productive economy in Angwan Rogo (Jos North) (twenty-member cooperative societies acquiring grinding machines, establishing food stalls, and operating a beneficiary-populated street market), represents a spontaneous, programme-catalysed collective economic empowerment phenomenon without documented parallel in the Nigerian CCT literature. Third, the programme’s identity politics produce a specifically gendered social recognition. The label ‘Hajiyoyin gwamnati’ (Women of the government), documented in Angwan Rogo, confers a prestige-inflected citizenship identity on beneficiaries that transforms their social position in ways the financial data alone cannot capture. Together, these findings document a gendered empowerment paradox in which the same programme simultaneously constrains individual financial autonomy through intra-household resource dynamics and generates collective economic agency through cooperative formation. The article argues that this paradox is not resolved by choosing between the deficit and the asset framing; it is resolved by programme design that actively protects the first while deliberately scaling the second.