Every March, thousands of Nigerian organisations align with an International Women’s Day theme, without knowing that the most popular one is set by a London marketing firm, not the United Nations. That distinction is not minor. It is a mirror.
Right now, across Lagos boardrooms, Abuja HR departments and Port Harcourt corporate WhatsApp groups, the same question is being quietly asked: “Which IWD theme are we using this year?”
Banners are being designed. Committees are being convened. Budgets are being approved. And most of the people doing all of this have no idea that the theme and pose they are about to amplify was created not by the United Nations, but by a private marketing company in London whose primary business, it turns out, is selling purple merchandise.
This is not a small administrative detail. In a country where gender equality remains one of our most urgent unfinished tasks, the choice of what framework we use to talk about it, and who profits from that framing, matters deeply.
Consider the ground beneath our feet. In 2025, Nigeria ranked 124th out of 148 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, and last in Sub-Saharan Africa for women’s parliamentary representation, with only 4.3 per cent of legislative seats held by women. Rwanda has achieved 61.3 per cent. Nigeria’s House of Representatives has 16 women out of 360 members. The Senate has four.
The IMF reports that women account for 70 per cent of the country’s extremely poor, earn forty-five per cent less than men in equivalent roles, and make up seventy-seven per cent of trafficking victims. More than 7.6 million girls are currently out of school. These are structural failures that require structural responses — exactly the kind that one of the two competing IWD frameworks was designed to produce, and the other was not.
Each year, two organisations publish an International Women’s Day theme. Most people assume they are variations of the same thing. They are not. UN Women, a registered UN body whose mandate connects directly to the Sustainable Development Goals, publishes a theme grounded in global gender data, policy, and accountability. This year’s theme is “Rights. Justice. Action. For all Women and Girls.”
On the other side is internationalwomensday.com, a private commercial website operated by Aurora Ventures, a London-based marketing firm. When The Guardian investigated it in late 2025, they found that major UK institutions — a supermarket chain, a major bank, the national broadcaster — had all promoted its theme, believing they were following the UN.
The University of Warwick removed a blog post and told the paper they were unaware they had been using an unofficial commercial platform. The UN has publicly distanced itself from the website. Its 2026 event pack, built around the theme, “Give to Gain,” retails for £184.
This is not a British problem. The same pattern plays out here, every year, with Nigerian organisations just as likely to be misled — and just as unlikely to have asked where the theme came from before putting it on a banner or creating an event around it.
“Asking women to ‘give’ more just to ‘gain’ equality is not a call to action. It is a description of the problem dressed up as a solution.”
The framing of “Give to Gain” deserves scrutiny. Nigerian women already give. They give their labour — formal and informal, paid and unpaid. They give their safety, navigating streets, offices and homes where gender-based violence is pervasive. They give their ambitions, accommodating systems that were not designed with them in mind.
Thirteen per cent of women aged fifteen to forty-nine have reported physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. Asking these women to give more to deserve equality is not empowerment. Contrast that with “Rights. Justice. Action.” Language that places the obligation of change where it belongs: on institutions and those who hold power within them, not on women who have already been carrying far too much.
There is a broader pattern at work here. International Women’s Day has, in many corporate contexts, been gradually hollowed out — transformed from a day of political reckoning into what critics have called a marketing event akin to Valentine’s Day. The flood of purple campaigns, striking poses, and panel discussions that vanish by March 9th is not neutral. It actively displaces the harder conversations.
In Nigeria, where the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill has been rejected in the National Assembly, where women’s ministerial representation dropped from 17.6 per cent to 8.8 per cent between 2024 and 2025, and where no dedicated budget line exists for gender statistics, performative alignment is a luxury we cannot afford. The World Economic Forum projects it will take 123 years, at the current pace, to close the global gender gap. We do not have 123 years!
Some will ask: can organisations not simply use the IWD.com pose for the photograph and the UN Women theme for the message? Perhaps. But it is worth noting that the photograph is part of the message. When the visual language of your campaign belongs to a merchandise platform and the words belong to a policy body, the result is incoherence — and audiences, even when they cannot name it, feel it.
Before selecting a theme, every individual or organisation planning an IWD activity should be able to honestly answer three questions: Where does this theme come from, and who benefits from its promotion? Does our alignment reflect what we actually do for women inside our organisation? And are we using this day to examine ourselves — or simply to be seen?
An organisation with an unexplained gender pay gap, no women in senior leadership, or a pattern of ignoring harassment complaints does not become a gender equity advocate by posting the right hashtag on March 8th. In a country where a sitting senator was suspended after raising sexual harassment allegations against the Senate President, and where the first female Speaker of the Lagos House of Representatives resigned two weeks into her term, the framing of our public commitments matters enormously.
Nigerian women are not waiting for better slogans. They are waiting for workplaces that protect them, parliaments that represent them, and institutions that take their safety, autonomy and ambition seriously. That work does not begin with a theme. But it does require choosing — consciously and publicly — which story about women you intend to tell.
Choose it on purpose.
Areo is co-founder of Nesta Coworkspace, Project Lead at ACEDEN and can be reached at [email protected]
