Why Is Governor Eno Investing ₦31 Billion on Women’s Cooperatives? Lessons From FEYReP

Why Is Governor Eno Investing ₦31 Billion on Women’s Cooperatives? Lessons From FEYReP

By Clement Warrie

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the development world, like I was fortunate to do, will tell you right off the bat that giving grants or loans to individuals in the grassroots—whether or not they are already in business or are first-time entrepreneurs—however well-intentioned, have a poor survival rate.
This is not about the capacity of the women. It is basic economic reality.

Time and again, it has been proven that capital for businesses in the rural communities get absorbed into household emergencies like school fees, medical bills, and debts long before it becomes a functioning business.

That is why investment in cooperatives is different. The truth is, when women trade in organized cooperative groups, especially in rural communities, they become each other’s collateral. Nobody wants to be the one who defaults on a loan and lets the group down, so repayment is sacrosanct.

This is what makes Governor Umo Eno’s investment in women’s cooperatives so widely applauded as a masterpiece. It doesn’t just hand money to women and hope for the best. It plugs them into a historically failsafe, time-tested, local economic architecture built to make the money survive long enough to work.

I learned this firsthand from years in development work as Head of Media and Communications at the Family Empowerment and Youth Reorientation Path Initiative (FEYReP), founded by former First Lady Mrs. Martha Udom Emmanuel, wife of immediate past governor Mr. Udom Emmanuel.

I was in the field a lot. With Mrs. Ime Inyang, then-Coordinator of the NGO, we went into communities and organized women into cooperative clusters across the 31 LGAs of the state. It was a tedious process that demanded strict attention to group membership.

It was through those engagements — the endless Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), visiting loan and grant beneficiaries, sitting through cooperative meetings and thrift contributions, or just being part of repayment sessions — that I witnessed the real difference. The difference between empowerment designed to last, and empowerment done only for political photographs.

I watched women who received capital individually, with no group structure around them, struggle within months, with the money absorbed into emergencies before it ever became a business. I also watched, in the very same communities, women who received smaller amounts through a cooperative structure grow steadily, because the group itself became their discipline, their support system, and their safety net.

That contrast is not theoretical to me. It is something I documented. And it is exactly why I find Governor Umo Eno’s cooperative-based approach to women’s empowerment worth the commendation it is getting.

Cooperative societies have piled up evidence of success behind them. From the Grameen model in Bangladesh to Nigeria’s own thrift and contribution traditions, our mothers and grandmothers already understood the model instinctively.

What makes the cooperative structure work comes down to a few mechanics worth spelling out for anyone trying to judge whether the Governor’s ₦20 million per ward injection into 369 wards will actually move the needle.

First, there is joint liability — when women are organized in groups, they effectively become each other’s collateral. Nobody wants to be the member who defaults and embarrasses the group, so repayment discipline rises even without the physical collateral that most rural women simply do not have.

Second, there is the savings-first principle: a cooperative that has been meeting, contributing, and building trust before it receives government capital already has financial discipline baked in. And there is monitoring and mentoring too — women in the same trade watch, advise, and sometimes correct each other in ways no government official visiting once a quarter ever could.

That is why directing some women’s empowerment programmes in the state through cooperative societies, as the Governor has done, is a more sophisticated policy choice than it might first appear to a casual observer.

It is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is designed to convert scattered, hard-to-monitor cash disbursements into a traceable, accountable system — one where the Bureau for Cooperatives, under Mrs. Alice Ekpenyong’s oversight, can actually track where the ₦20 million per ward goes, how it revolves, and whether it is being repaid and re-lent to the next set of women.

What I learned at FEYReP is that cooperatives ensure funds don’t disappear after a single disbursement. They revolve, moving from one woman to the next, so ₦31 billion doesn’t just empower one generation of beneficiaries — it keeps working, cycle after cycle, for years to come.

And because the women are organized, they gain something no individual grant can buy: bargaining power to buy in bulk, negotiate better prices, and eventually qualify for larger credit from banks that would never look at them alone. That is an economic engine. And it is why the Governor’s ₦31 billion bet on cooperatives is not spending, but an investment in the economy of the Akwa Ibom people.

Seen against this backdrop, the decision looks less like policy improvisation and more like the product of a particular kind of mind. Governor Eno’s approach to the ₦31 billion cooperative investment did not emerge from theory. It came from the instinct of a man who built his own wealth as an entrepreneur before ever holding public office, and who understands, better than most career politicians, that money without structure disappears while money channelled through disciplined systems multiplies.

It is fitting, then, that this governance style has already earned him national recognition. In January 2026, Governor Eno received the Nigeria Excellence Awards in Public Service for Sustainable Development and Community Empowerment, presented on behalf of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in honour of a governance philosophy rooted in inclusion, sustainability, and grassroots impact.

//Clement Warrie is an Aide to Governor Umo Eno on Media, and President of the Uyo Senatorial District Media Professionals’ Forum//