Going back to work should not end breastfeeding

The six-month exclusive breastfeeding recommendation collides with something very ordinary in Nigeria: most mothers have to work, and most of them have to go back well before six months.

For the woman in formal employment, the collision is with the length of maternity leave. For the trader, the tailor, the farmer and the woman selling at a roadside stall, there is no leave to speak of at all. She works because the household income stops otherwise, and she is back at it far sooner than any policy document imagines.

These are two different problems and they need two different conversations.

For formal employment, the useful starting point is that Nigerian law already provides more than most working mothers realise. The Labour Act sets out maternity leave, payment during that leave, and, on return to work, paid breaks for nursing. Federal public service provisions are more generous than the private-sector minimum, and a number of states have gone further still. UNICEF Nigeria reported in 2025 that 12 of the 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory offer paid maternity leave of up to six months. That is a genuine advance from where we were. It also means the majority of the country is not there yet.

The gap is rarely that employers refuse outright. It is that nobody asks, nobody has written a policy, and there is nowhere private to sit. A woman who wants to express milk at work in a great many Nigerian offices will find her only private option is a toilet cubicle, which is not a place anyone should be asked to prepare food.

What an employer actually needs to provide is modest. A room, or part of a room, with a door that closes and a chair that supports the back. Somewhere cool to store expressed milk. Break times that are predictable enough to plan around, because milk production runs on a schedule whether or not the meeting does. That is close to the entire list, and it costs less than replacing an experienced employee who leaves because the arrangement was impossible.

The business argument has been made in Nigerian terms. UNICEF Nigeria has estimated that every thousand naira invested in supporting breastfeeding returns roughly thirty-five thousand. At the national level, research published in Health Policy and Planning in 2019 put the economic cost of inadequate breastfeeding in Nigeria at around twenty-one billion United States dollars, close to four per cent of gross national income. Organisations spend more than that on far weaker propositions.

The informal sector is harder, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. There is no HR policy to invoke at a market stall. What exists instead is arrangement, and arrangement is what should be encouraged: a shaded corner behind the stall, a stool rather than a crate, an agreement with the trader in the next space to watch the goods for fifteen minutes, a wrapper for privacy. Market associations and trade groups are the relevant unit here rather than employers, and they are capable of setting norms quickly when they choose to. A market association that declares a shaded feeding corner near the entrance has done something more useful than most workplace policies.

For any mother returning to work, a few practical points. Milk supply responds to removal, so expressing during the working day protects supply as well as producing milk for the baby. Expressed breast milk keeps safely for several hours at room temperature and considerably longer refrigerated. Feeding directly before leaving and immediately on return maintains both supply and the relationship. And a mother whose supply dips during a difficult work period has not failed; supply is responsive and usually recovers when feeding or expressing frequency increases.

If you employ people, the question worth asking this week is not whether you support breastfeeding in principle. It is where, physically, in your building, a woman is expected to do it.