After the Handover: Rethinking CSR’s Role in Women’s Economic Empowerment

“If you educate a woman, you educate a nation” is a familiar saying. Its message remains relevant because when women have the opportunity to earn, build and grow, the benefits extend far beyond the individual.

Across Nigeria, women already contribute significantly to economic activity. They run businesses across agriculture, food processing, fashion, retail and countless other sectors. Yet starting a business and growing it sustainably are very different.

Women account for about 40% of early-stage entrepreneurs in Nigeria, but their representation declines as businesses grow. Women own about 43% of micro-enterprises, compared with 22% of small and medium-sized businesses and 20% of larger enterprises. Access to finance remains a significant barrier, with 45% of Nigerian women having access to funding compared with 56% of men. Meanwhile, over 50% of small businesses reportedly fail within their first year, with financing challenges and infrastructure deficits among the factors contributing to business failure.

The picture is clear: for many Nigerian women, the challenge is not a lack of ambition. It is whether they have what they need to have sustainable, growing businesses. This raises an important question for corporate social responsibility (CSR): what does meaningful economic empowerment actually look like?

Community empowerment often follows a familiar pattern. Organisations identify beneficiaries, provide intervention, measure the number of people reached, move on to the next programme, and show up the next year for a new set of beneficiaries. While immediate support can make a meaningful difference, economic empowerment requires a longer view. The more important question is what happens after the intervention.

This is where the Segilola Women Initiative Programme (SWIP), launched in 2021 by Segilola Resources Operating Limited (SROL), Nigeria’s first large-scale commercial gold mine, offers a different perspective. Through SWIP, women in SROL’s host communities of Imogbara, Odo Ijesha and Iperindo have received business equipment and support designed to strengthen their enterprises. Since its launch, the programme has empowered more than 200 women.

This year, the sixth edition provided 30 women with equipment tailored to their businesses, including freezers, sewing and stoning machines, digesters, multipurpose grinders, gas burners and cooler sets, alongside financial literacy education. But perhaps more significant was what happened alongside this latest intervention. As part of SWIP’s ongoing monitoring, SROL returned to previous beneficiaries to assess their progress and identify what could help them take their businesses further. Three women, one from each host community, received additional equipment to increase production capacity, expand their product offerings and diversify their services.

The distinction is simple but essential: SWIP does not only ask who needs support today; it also asks what previous beneficiaries need to keep moving forward.  This is why continuous monitoring can change the value of an empowerment programme. It allows organisations to understand what happens after an intervention, identify emerging needs, and provide support based on business realities rather than assumptions. More importantly, it shifts the focus from simply reaching beneficiaries to helping them build businesses that can eventually create opportunities for others.

That growth can extend well beyond the individual entrepreneur. Research shows that women reinvest up to 90% of their income into their families and communities. As a woman’s business grows, so can her household income, her ability to employ others, train apprentices, educate her children or support other businesses around her. The result is a multiplier effect: an investment in one woman’s business can create value far beyond the original intervention.

The experience of the Segilola Women Initiative Programme (SWIP) offers a useful lesson for companies looking to make their community investments more meaningful: impact is not always about doing more; sometimes, it is about staying invested for longer. For organisations working to advance women’s economic empowerment, this means looking beyond the number of beneficiaries reached and considering what happens after the intervention. Did the business survive? Did production increase? Did the beneficiary expand her products or services? Did she create employment or support others in her community? And, most importantly, what additional support might help her take the next step? These questions can help companies move from measuring outputs to understanding outcomes. This does not mean every CSR programme must provide indefinite support. Rather, it means designing interventions with the next stage of growth in mind. A sewing machine, freezer or business grant may be the beginning of an entrepreneur’s journey, not the measure of its success.

For me, this is an important shift in how we think about economic empowerment. A programme’s success should not be determined solely by what is delivered on the day of an intervention, but by whether that support continues to create value over time. Sustained engagement and regular monitoring can help organisations understand changing needs and ensure that their interventions remain relevant as beneficiaries and their businesses evolve. The opportunity for companies, therefore, is to ask a different question. Instead of only asking, “How many people did we reach?”, we should also be asking, “What changed because we were there?”

That shift moves CSR beyond the handover and towards a more meaningful understanding of impact. It recognises that economic empowerment is not a single event, but a journey from access and support to stability, growth and, ultimately, greater economic independence. The strongest CSR interventions may not necessarily be those with the biggest handover ceremonies or the highest number of beneficiaries. They may be the ones that stay connected to the question of what happens next.

The real measure of women’s economic empowerment is not simply whether a woman received support. It is whether that support helped her build something that can stand, grow and create opportunities beyond herself. When CSR moves from counting beneficiaries to enabling business growth, it becomes more than social investment. It becomes an investment in communities’ economic capacity—and in the women who can help build their future.

.Madhurii Sarkar-Amoda is the Community Development and Stakeholder Manager at Segilola Resources Operating Limited (SROL).  

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