Intersectionality and Social Policy: Developing a Framework for Gender-Inclusive Social Protection in Nigeria

Nigeria's social protection architecture has developed rapidly in the past decade, yet its design and implementation remain largely gender-blind and intersectionality-unaware, limiting its transformative potential for the most multiply disadvantaged women. This study develops an intersectionality-informed framework for gender-inclusive social protection in Nigeria, drawing on empirical analysis of existing programmes and original theoretical work. A transformative pragmatist paradigm underpins a multi-method design: critical analysis of 12 major social protection programmes, participatory workshops with 180 multiply marginalised women across all six zones, survey of 250 social protection programme officers, and expert consultation with 40 gender and social policy specialists. Intersectionality theory, social protection systems thinking, and feminist policy analysis guided framework construction. Findings demonstrate that current social protection programmes fail multiply disadvantaged women, including those facing compounded gender, disability, ethnicity, and geographic disadvantage, through single-axis targeting, inaccessible delivery systems, and absence of agency-building components. The resulting Intersectional Social Protection Framework (ISPF) provides design principles, targeting criteria, delivery system guidelines, and monitoring indicators for gender-inclusive social protection in the Nigerian context. The ISPF is validated through expert panel assessment and retrospective policy simulation. This study makes an original and practically relevant contribution to social policy scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa. Keywords: intersectionality, social protection, gender inclusion, Nigeria, policy framework