One thread ties the entire volume together, and it is the one announced in the title. Leading with our humanity means beginning with the recognition that the people who programmes are designed to serve are not a homogeneous beneficiary class. They are individuals, differentiated by proximity to power and by the irreducible specificity of their lives. Amartya Sen’s formulation that development is freedom opens the book’s foundational chapter not as decoration but as conviction, and it is clear the On Nigeria team believed it.
There is a particular kind of book that does not announce itself as important. It arrives clothed in the language of programme documentation and then, somewhere between the Foreword and the second chapter, you realise you are reading something that will sit with you for a long time. Leading With Our Humanity: Elevating Communities through Gender Equity and Social Inclusion by Amina A Salihu is exactly that kind of book.
Launched under the ‘Big Ideas platform’ at the Yar’adua Centre in Abuja on Friday, 22nd May, the volume is, on one level, a learning document drawn from the MacArthur Foundation’s On Nigeria Program, which ran for nearly a decade before winding down in 2024. On another level, it is a meditation on power, on who gets to stand close to it and who is perpetually pushed to its outer edges, and on what it actually costs an institution to choose equity over comfort.
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The Foreword, written by Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah R Gbowee, sets the pace for everything that follows. Gbowee writes from the bone, recalling a childhood in Monrovia watching a relative’s wife trapped in cycles of abuse and economic dependence, and vowing that she would never depend on anyone’s mercy. That testimony grounds the intellectual enterprise in human stakes. What this book is doing, Gbowee signals, is not abstract theorising. It is the architecture of survival for the women and communities that institutions like MacArthur seek to serve.
Salihu, a deputy director at the Foundation’s Africa office, approaches her subject with the confidence of someone who has lived inside the work. Among the book’s finest contributions is the conceptual clarity she brings to the Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) framework. She insists on a distinction that development practitioners often elide: equality is the destination, the state of justice achieved; equity is the road, the deliberate rebalancing of conditions so that those furthest from power can begin to close the gap. In Nigeria’s social landscape, where gender, geography, generation, disability, faith, and class intersect to create compounding disadvantage, this is not a semantic distinction. It is a strategic one.
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The book moves across five objectives and twenty-one chapters, travelling from the philosophical to the granular, from grantmaking mechanics to the testimonies of civil society organisations navigating resistance in communities where inclusion is still treated as a foreign imposition. Chapter Four, on naming as a leadership practice, is a quiet revelation. The story of their Chicago colleagues receiving Yoruba and Hausa names carries something that cannot be captured in a results framework. It captures the feeling of being seen.
Chapter Seventeen, the account of an afternoon spent with sign language interpreters, achieves the same effect through a different register. What emerges is the exposure of a systemic absence: an entire community of communicators who make inclusion possible for the deaf, yet who are themselves excluded from most conversations about disability and access. The irony is not lost on Salihu, and she does not let it be lost on the reader.
Throughout, the anecdotal and the empirical are in productive tension. One encounters Yobe State’s budget credibility rate climbing from 61 per cent to 95 per cent after GESI-aligned interventions, and then, a few pages later, the story of Ebenebe women in South-East Nigeria who refused to trade their votes in the 2023 elections and demanded a social contract from political candidates instead. Both are evidence. The numbers and the narrative together make the case that inclusive programming does not merely feel good; it works.
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The book’s treatment of resistance is equally honest. Cultural and patriarchal pushback is not euphemised. CHRICED’s battles over the Kano State Free Maternal and Child Healthcare Bill, the hostility faced by the Almajiri Child Rights Initiative from communities accusing them of being “not Hausa enough,” and the difficulty of getting women onto radio programmes, all of these are rendered with a candour that makes institutional learning documents rare and credible. Salihu does not write a success story. She writes a learning story, and the two are very different things.
The chapter on the cohort approach, describing how grantee-partners were grouped by theme and geography and pushed to collaborate before any money changed hands, is among the most practically useful sections for anyone in philanthropy or civil society management. The insight that contribution matters more than attribution in collective social change work is not new, but Salihu’s granular detailing of the mechanics makes it actionable in ways that theorising alone never could.
One thread ties the entire volume together, and it is the one announced in the title. Leading with our humanity means beginning with the recognition that the people who programmes are designed to serve are not a homogeneous beneficiary class. They are individuals, differentiated by proximity to power and by the irreducible specificity of their lives. Amartya Sen’s formulation that development is freedom opens the book’s foundational chapter not as decoration but as conviction, and it is clear the On Nigeria team believed it.
Read this book for its intellectual architecture. Read it for its stories. Read it because it will ask you, without quite raising its voice, to examine your own proximity to power and what you are prepared to do with it.
Mohammed Dahiru Lawal is Head of Fact-Check and Special Projects at PRNigeria Centre Abuja.
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