Dr Amina Salihu
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 January, 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.
