Nigeria’s trillion-dollar ambition has a human capital problem

Ask what will decide whether Nigeria becomes a one trillion-dollar economy, and you will hear a familiar list.

More graduates.

More coding academies.

More vocational training.  A skills gap, to be closed with the right programmes and the right budget.

It is a comforting diagnosis, because it is the kind you can fix in a single budget cycle.

It is also aimed at the wrong end of a person’s life. For most Nigerians, the trillion-dollar question is largely settled before they turn five, and before they can read a sentence.

Start with the most recent measure the World Bank has. In 2026 it set out what a Nigerian child born today can expect to earn across a working life, given the country’s current health, schooling and jobs, against what the same child could achieve with full health and a complete education.

Its verdict is blunt. Deficits in three areas, nutrition, learning and skills on the job, are costing a child born today about half of their future earnings. Put the other way, the Bank estimates that closing those gaps would raise future incomes by roughly 111 percent, close to double.

This is not a new or contested concern. The Bank’s original Human Capital Index had already put Nigeria at 0.36 in 2020, its last full round, meaning a child then could expect to reach adulthood with only about 36 percent of the productivity that full health and a complete education would allow.

The newer measure, using 2025 data, reaches the same conclusion and sharpens it. India and Vietnam, two countries that keep appearing in this series, both sit well above Nigeria. Human capital is not the only thing that decides growth; capital, infrastructure, institutions and technology all matter too. But it sets the ceiling on how productively a country can use any of them.