Jigawa, UNICEF: A partnership worth emulating
By Lawal Jet Kaugama
When the new head of UNICEF Nigeria’s Kano Field Office, Mr Shafeeq Ur-Rehman, walked into the Government House in Dutse recently, he was not merely paying a y aourtesy call, but was stepping into a relationship more than three decades in the making, one that Gov Umar Namadi has not only sustained but deepened, giving it renewed clarity of purpose at a time when many subnational governments struggle to keep development partnerships coherent beyond photo opportunities.
It would be easy to dismiss such meetings as routine diplomatic courtesies, the kind that dot every governor’s calendar. But a closer look at what has actually been achieved in Jigawa State suggests something more substantial is at work: a governance culture that treats partnership not as a transaction but as a shared long-term project.
Consider the record. Jigawa became Nigeria’s first state to achieve Open Defecation Free status, a public health milestone that many states with far greater resources have failed to reach.
The home-grown MASAKI Nutrition Programme, designed and driven by the state itself rather than imported wholesale from a development partner’s template, has become a reference point for tackling malnutrition among children and women. These are not abstract statistics; they represent measurable improvements in the daily lives of some of the most vulnerable citizens in Nigeria’s North-West.
What is particularly instructive is that other states are now adopting initiatives first piloted in Jigawa. This detail, easy to skim past, deserves emphasis. Policy innovation in Nigeria too often flows in one direction: from the centre outward, or from wealthier states downward. That Jigawa, a state not typically associated with abundant resources, has become a source of replicable models for health, nutrition, and social protection speaks to a deliberate, disciplined approach to governance rather than happenstance.
Governor Namadi’s own framing of the relationship is worth taking seriously. He has been explicit that children and women remain at the centre of the state’s partnership with UNICEF, and that this focus must continue.
In a political environment where development priorities can shift with each electoral cycle or change in personnel, this consistency of focus is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the precondition for any of the gains outlined above to be sustained rather than reversed.
The discussions in Dutse also touched on the outcomes of the recent North-West High-Level Policy Dialogue, with an explicit commitment to strengthening support systems for vulnerable children and families across the region.
This regional dimension matters. The North-West geopolitical zone faces some of the country’s most acute humanitarian and developmental pressures, from insecurity to displacement to entrenched poverty.
A state government willing to anchor its own domestic achievements within a broader regional conversation — rather than treating its successes as isolated wins, signals a level of strategic seriousness that the zone badly needs.
Perhaps most significant is the forward-looking commitment secured during this engagement: UNICEF’s reaffirmed dedication to working with Jigawa under the next Federal Government UNICEF Country Programme, running from 2028 to 2032. This is not a small assurance.
International development partners calibrate their long-term commitments based on demonstrated capacity for delivery and institutional trust. That UNICEF is prepared to extend its partnership with Jigawa well into the next decade is, in effect, a vote of confidence in the systems Namadi’s administration has built; systems robust enough to survive beyond any single tenure.
Critics of subnational governance in Nigeria often point, not unreasonably, to a pattern of ribbon-cutting without follow-through, of programmes that exist more in press releases than in outcomes. Jigawa’s UNICEF partnership offers a useful counterexample.
The ODF achievement is independently verifiable. The MASAKI Nutrition Programme has tangible reach. The replication of Jigawa’s models by other states is, in itself, a form of external validation that no government press office could manufacture on its own.
None of this suggests the work is finished. Vulnerable families across Jigawa and the wider North-West continue to face real hardship, and the governor himself has acknowledged that the task now is to put the right systems in place so that assistance reaches those who genuinely need it, an honest admission that good intentions alone do not guarantee equitable delivery.
That candour, rather than triumphalism, is itself a sign of a government paying attention to the gap between programme design and programme impact.
As Nigeria’s states look for models of how to convert international development partnerships into durable local outcomes, Jigawa under Gov Namadi offers a case study worth studying; not for its rhetoric, but for what has actually been built, measured, and, increasingly, copied.
Lawal Jet Kaugama a commentator on national issues, writes from Kano