Beyond the Checkpoints

Over the past few weeks, my colleagues and I at the International Budget Partnership (IBP) found ourselves traveling across seven states in Nigeria; Anambra, Oyo, Ogun, Nasarawa, Niger, Kano, and Jigawa: introducing a new approach to service delivery in health and agriculture sectors.

Our mission was clear: Move beyond isolated interventions, deepen local ownership, and strengthen real outcomes, especially for maternal health and smallholder women farmers. But what we experienced went far beyond technical recommendations. It was a firsthand immersion into the human realities, the hopes, frustrations, resilience, and systemic gaps that numbers and reports often fail to capture.

In every community we engaged, whether with SWOFON, FOMWAN, JDPC, or other critical partners, a few consistent themes surfaced:

1. Primary Health Care (PHC) Systems: Health centers needed far more than medical supplies. Without consistent electricity, potable water, or efficient personnel management, even the best-designed interventions collapsed under daily realities.

2. Agricultural Systems: Farmers faced critical gaps in timely access to inputs like fertilizers and seeds. Challenges around market access and pricing were pronounced, with middlemen often dictating unfavorable terms that trapped farmers in cycles of poverty.

3. Women in Agriculture: There was a strong call for creating dedicated women’s agriculture units within ministries and institutions, ensuring that policies didn’t just mention women, but centered their realities.

4. Rural Youth Disengagement: Across states, the exodus of young people from agriculture and healthcare was stark. With experienced hands aging out and young people discouraged by systemic failures, the future workforce in critical sectors looked fragile. One underlying reality tied many of these issues together: INSECURITY. Across all regions, insecurity wasn’t an abstract statistic; it shaped livelihoods directly, disrupting farming seasons, shrinking access to markets, and fuelling Nigeria’s growing food inflation crisis. The local clashes often reported in the news are not distant tales; they are daily constraints faced by communities trying to survive and thrive.

Systems Thinking in Action: When Data Isn’t Enough

Between sessions and site visits, I found time to revisit two books: Neuromarketing and The Tyranny of Metrics.

One of my colleagues saw the book and blurted out in pidgin, “Folahan, wetin you dey sell? No worry, we'll patronize you, no need to read this book. What started as a distraction became a quiet reminder: understanding human behavior at a deeper level, beyond formal logic, is essential even in policy work. But it was The Tyranny of Metrics that hit closer to home.

As we traveled from one state to another, from partners’ meetings to side conversations with colleagues on the field, it became painfully clear: “Metrics often measure the easiest things, not the most meaningful ones”. Counting the number of PHCs built means little if mothers still walk miles to find water before they find medicine. Tracking fertilizer distribution figures is hollow if market access remains strangled by insecurity.

True systems change demands that we see beyond numbers into people's daily lives, and numbers, important as they are, should be a signpost on that journey; we must look at the intended and unintended consequences of what each number represents.

Travel Diaries: Checkpoints, Missed Flights, and Wedding Breaks

Of course, it wasn’t all data and diagnostics. Travel taught us patience and humor. Across the Southeast, checkpoint after checkpoint reminded us that insecurity wasn’t just a news headline but a daily reality. Something didn’t feel right with the number of military checkpoints within a maximum of every 1500km. At some point, we joked that we should start greeting soldiers by name, given how often we passed the same ones.

Hotels also offered a crash course in adaptive resilience: Warm showers seem like a luxury request in hotels self-branded as 5-star hotels; for a few days, we had to make do with a cold shower. And when some hotels say “continental breakfast,” it is sometimes more continental drift: a slow slide from expectation to reality. Flights…well, Nigerian domestic flights now deserve their own UNESCO heritage status for unpredictability.

In the middle of all this, life offered a beautiful reprieve: A chance to attend a long-time friend’s wedding, the only real breather weekend during the entire trip. Laughter, dancing, and the luxury of seeing familiar faces outside stakeholder engagements refreshed the spirit more than any hotel bed could

There were also lighter moments of travel banter. To spice things up, one colleague rebranded me from “Folahan” to “Afolayan.” It stuck, much to my amusement (and reluctant acceptance).

Final Reflections: Systems thinking is not a toolkit. It’s a worldview.

The biggest lesson from the journey wasn’t buried in the technical notes we collected. It was lived in the struggles, the compromises, the resilience, and the laughter we encountered across Nigeria. One that demands empathy, patience, flexibility, and a stubborn refusal to let metrics define reality.

If we genuinely want to fix health, agricultural, or governance systems, we must start by fixing how we see people, not as beneficiaries or statistics but as equal partners in designing the future.

In the end, our trip wasn’t just about engaging partners. It was about being engaged by the systems themselves, checkpoint after checkpoint, missed flight after missed flight, learning that real service delivery begins not in strategy documents but in walking alongside those we hope to serve.

And that, checkpoint jokes and all, was a journey worth taking.