How NEPC is Changing Nigeria’s Export Story, by Kabir Abdulsalam

How NEPC Is Changing Nigeria’s Export Story

By Kabir Abdulsalam,

When Nonye Ayeni took the helm of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) in October 2023, she inherited an agency navigating global trade disruptions, a weakened naira and Nigeria’s decades-old dependence on crude oil revenue. Nearly three years on, the Council’s numbers tell a different story and, increasingly, so does the way it runs itself.

In 2025, Nigeria’s non-oil exports hit an all-time high of $6.1 billion, an 11.5 percent increase from the $5.46 billion recorded the previous year. Export volumes rose to 8.02 million metric tonnes, up 10 percent year-on-year. Nigerian products now reach 210 export markets across 120 countries, compared with just 93 markets a decade ago.

The Netherlands remains the single largest destination, accounting for more than 17 percent of total export value, while a widening basket of buyers across Asia, the Americas and Africa is gradually reducing Nigeria’s reliance on any single region.

Those figures have earned headlines. What has received less attention is the quieter engineering behind them—a set of internal reforms at NEPC that may help make the growth more sustainable rather than accidental.

NEPC’s public narrative has largely centred on trade figures, but the Council’s own account of the past two years points to a parallel investment in its most important resource: its people.

More than 75 percent of NEPC personnel have undergone professional training since 2023, according to the Council. The initiative is part of a deliberate effort to strengthen the directorate cadre and create clearer advancement pathways for staff across departments, rather than relying primarily on external recruitment to fill capacity gaps.

That internal investment runs…