Have you ever been in a situation where someone in your group, someone you never quite noticed, suddenly fell sick or was absent for a while, and only then did you realise how much they had been doing all along? The meetings that used to run smoothly now feel disorganised. The things that used to just get done are now sitting undone. People are looking around asking questions that nobody can answer. And slowly it dawns on everyone in the room that the reason things worked was not far-fetched. It was that person. Quietly, consistently, without ever asking to be seen.
Now think about the women in your community. And ask yourself the same question.
Across Nigeria, in cities and in villages, in local government areas and in urban neighbourhoods, there are women who are the reason things hold together. Not in a way that gets them into newspapers or earns them awards. The woman who wakes up before anyone else in the household to make sure her children leave for school fed and ready. The one who runs a small business that keeps her family financially afloat. The one who organises the women in her community to pool resources together so that each of them can access something none of them could afford alone.
These women are everywhere. And most of the time, nobody is talking about them.
There is a particular kind of invisibility that attaches itself to care work, the work of nurturing, organising, holding, and sustaining. It is work that societies depend on completely and acknowledge almost never. In Nigeria, this invisibility is layered. It sits on top of cultural norms that have long positioned women’s contributions as simply what women do, expected, natural, unremarkable. When something is expected of you, it rarely gets celebrated. It just gets taken. And so the woman who has been holding her family and her community together for decades does so without recognition, without resources tailored to support her, and often without even the language to describe what she does as a contribution worthy of investment.
The cost of this invisibility is real. When women’s work goes unrecognised, it also goes unsupported. Programmes and policies get designed without accounting for what women are already doing, which means they often either duplicate effort or miss the point entirely. Resources flow past the very people who know best how to deploy them at community level. Decisions get made in rooms where the people with the most ground-level knowledge, women who live and work inside these communities every day, are not present. And the result is development that looks good on paper but does not quite work the way it should on the ground.
There is also a personal cost. A woman who gives everything to her family and community while receiving very little in return, no investment in her own skills, no recognition of her leadership, no access to the resources that would make her work easier and her impact greater eventually hits a wall. Not because she has stopped caring, but because she has been running on empty for too long. The sustainability of community development depends on the sustainability of the women driving it. And right now, too many of those women are not being sustained.
What does it look like to truly invest in women at community level? It starts with seeing them. Not as beneficiaries of development programmes but as drivers of them. It means creating spaces where women’s knowledge and experience are treated as assets, because they are. It means designing support systems that make their existing work easier rather than adding more to their plates. It means funding women-led initiatives at the grassroots level, where the impact per naira spent is often higher than anywhere else. It means making sure that when decisions are being made about a community, the women who know that community best are in the room.
At Oselobua Family Foundation, women’s empowerment is not a programme we run on the side. It is woven into everything we do because we understand that you cannot build a strong community while ignoring the people holding it together. We have sat with women in communities who have never been asked what they think, what they need, or what they have already been doing.
The women doing the quiet work of community development in Nigeria do not need to be rescued. They need to be recognised. They need to be resourced. And they need to be given the credit that their work has always deserved.
Next time something in your community is running well, stop and ask yourself who is making that happen. Chances are, she has been there all along.