This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday.
Nigeria’s economy is growing faster than it has since the second quarter of 2021. But beyond the headline growth rate, Nigeria’s economy is not growing evenly.
A growing share of economic expansion is coming from telecommunications and the service sector, while some of the sectors that employ the most Nigerians are growing much more slowly.
This helps explain why stronger gross domestic product (GDP) growth has not necessarily translated into better living standards for many Nigerians. An economy can produce more without creating enough employment to materially improve living standards. About 139 million Nigerians still live below the national poverty line, the World Bank said in July.
Nigeria’s gross domestic product grew by 4.43% in real terms in the second quarter of 2026, up from 4.23% a year earlier. Real GDP strips out the effect of rising prices. In an economy experiencing high inflation, nominal output can increase simply because goods and services cost more. Real GDP growth is therefore a better measure of whether the economy is actually producing more.
GDP measures the total value of economic activity in a country, making its growth rate a useful indicator of whether the economy is expanding or contracting. But the headline number does not tell where that expansion is happening, how broad it is, or whether the sectors employing the most people are growing quickly enough to change household incomes.
A 5-Year High for Nigeria’s GDP
Nigeria’s economy grew 4.43% in Q2 2026—the fastest quarterly growth rate since Q2 2021. Tap across the timeline to see the five-year trajectory.
Nigeria’s growth slowed sharply after the 2021 post-pandemic recovery, spending much of 2023–2024 trapped in the 2–3% range. The steady acceleration throughout 2025 and into Q2 2026 marks a meaningful aggregate improvement.
The economy is growing, but not everything is growing equally
Nigeria’s services sector, which accounted for 56.62% of GDP, grew by 4.60% in Q2. The industry sector grew by 3.96%, down from 7.46% a year earlier, while agriculture grew by 4.39%.
Telecommunications and information grew by 10.38% in Q2, more than twice the pace of overall GDP growth. Trade grew by 2.40%. Manufacturing grew by 3.24%, while real estate grew by 3.76%.
Agriculture, which remains one of the country’s largest sources of employment, grew by 4.39%.
What Is Holding Nigeria’s Growth Back?
Nigeria’s economy grew 4.43% in Q2 2026. But some of its biggest sectors are still constrained by problems that growth alone cannot solve. Pick a sector to see what’s holding it back.
WHAT’S HOLDING IT BACK?
THE RESULT
THE BIGGER PROBLEM
Nigeria can digitise parts of its economy. It cannot digitise away the infrastructure needed to grow the sectors that produce food, goods and mass employment. Telecoms can expand digitally. Agriculture, manufacturing and trade still depend heavily on physical infrastructure.
Growth in agriculture has picked up, supported by government efforts to promote mechanisation and dry-season farming, as well as improved weather conditions in parts of the north-west, north-east and south-west, according to the World Bank.
But the sector continues to face structural constraints that limit how much it can expand. Conflict and insecurity disrupt production in key regions. Farmers also face limited access to quality seeds and fertilisers, climate risks such as flooding, high costs of imported inputs and machinery, limited access to finance, and poor logistics infrastructure.
Across most non-oil sectors, including manufacturing, inadequate infrastructure—particularly electricity, transportation and logistics—limited access to credit, high input costs and shortages of skilled labour continue to constrain growth, according to the World Bank.
Telecoms is becoming an increasingly important engine
Nigeria’s economy was worth ₦121.26 trillion ($91.78 billion) in Q2 2026.
Telecommunications and information services contributed ₦12.04 trillion ($9.11 billion) to that output. Only trade, at ₦27.38 trillion ($20.72 billion), and crop production, at ₦14.37 trillion ($10.88 billion), contributed more among the activities reported by the NBS.
Telecoms is now the third-largest contributor to the economy as the demand for connectivity in the country continues to grow.
MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest telecom operator by subscriber count, reported that average data usage per subscriber increased by 15.2% in the first half of 2026, while total data traffic rose by 25.8%. Smartphone penetration reached 66.4%. The company’s service revenue increased by 25.9% to ₦2.99 trillion ($2.26 billion) in the first half of 2026.
Across the country, data consumption grew 46.75% year-on-year in June 2026. With broadband penetration still below 60%, there is still room for the sector to expand further as it moves toward 100%.
Telecoms can therefore continue to add economic output as more Nigerians come online, businesses become more dependent on digital infrastructure, and existing users consume more data. That growth can also create opportunities for indirect job creation across the wider digital economy. But its impact on direct employment is likely to remain limited because many jobs in this industry require specialised skills, while the number of available roles tends to narrow as the industry becomes more efficient and technology-driven.
The problem is jobs
Telecoms can generate enormous economic value without employing as many people as agriculture, trade, manufacturing, or construction. As industries become more productive, they can generate more output without increasing their workforce at the same pace.
Between 2001 and 2010, Nigeria ranked among the world’s 15 fastest-growing economies, averaging 8.2% annual growth, according to the World Bank. Sectoral reforms in banking and telecoms also unlocked private sector development.
GDP per capita almost quadrupled during that period, from $568 in 2001 to $2,280 in 2010.
But the growth failed to produce significant job creation.
“The expansion of good quality non-farm jobs—a feature that characterised East Asia’s growth in the 1980s and 1990s—was absent in Nigeria,” the World Bank said. “Meanwhile, industries in the formal sector, such as financial services and hospitality, were either not very employment-intensive, or have added labor from a very low base, hence failing to make a significant difference in wage employment growth.”
Companies, especially those in the service sector, can become more valuable without becoming proportionately more labour-intensive.
For instance, the United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA) had 12,770 employees in 2015 and spent ₦57.45 billion ($43.48 million) on employee benefits. By 2025, its workforce had fallen to 10,821, while employee benefit expenses had risen to ₦123.49 billion ($91.68 million).
Between 2020 and 2025, MTN Nigeria’s direct employee count increased by 8.51% to 2,001.
Since 2001, the telecoms industry has created more than 500,000 direct jobs, as of 2025, while also creating an extensive ecosystem of indirect employment and economic activity. The telecom sector’s contribution to GDP, directly and indirectly, was estimated at ₦33 trillion ($24.98 billion) in 2023.
But 500,000 direct jobs is still small relative to the size of Nigeria’s labour force.
In 2023, agriculture alone employed more than 25 million people in farming, forestry and fishing activities, accounting for 30.1% of total employment, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Nigeria Is Growing. But Where Are the Jobs?
Nigeria’s economy grew 4.43% in Q2 2026. But growth is not reaching workers evenly. Compare four major sectors to see why GDP growth does not always translate into broad-based job creation.
Telecoms is growing much faster than the economy—but it does not need millions of workers to do it.
DIRECT EMPLOYMENT
THE GAP
Telecoms is one of the fastest-growing parts of Nigeria’s economy. But because the sector is capital- and technology-intensive, more output does not require proportionately more workers. It can lift GDP without becoming a mass employer.
THE BIGGER PROBLEM
Nigeria needs growth that does more than increase GDP. It needs growth that can absorb the millions of people entering the labour market.
Yet agriculture’s growth rate is less than half the telecoms’ growth rate. Manufacturing, another major source of employment and productive capacity, generated ₦9.38 trillion ($7.09 billion) in real output across its 13 subsectors.
The sectors producing some of the fastest growth are not necessarily the sectors capable of translating that growth into enough jobs and higher household incomes.
Telecoms will keep growing as Nigerians consume more data, and more economic activity moves online. But telecoms cannot carry the entire economy indefinitely.
Nigeria’s next phase of economic expansion needs manufacturing to expand, agriculture to become more productive, and construction to boom. These sectors not only add to GDP when they grow, but create productive jobs at a scale that services such as telecoms cannot.
The World Bank expects Nigeria to average real GDP growth of 4.2% between 2026 and 2028. However, infrastructure gaps, security challenges, and weak agricultural productivity are likely to constrain diversification and job creation, limiting gains in per capita incomes despite steady aggregate growth.
For now, the numbers show that Nigeria’s economy is growing, but it is not yet broad or deep enough to translate into real income growth for the average Nigerian.
True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks.
Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
Comments
Post a Comment