Nigeria is a resource-rich country in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the largest crude oil producer in the region and in possession of immense mineral wealth. Despite these facts, Nigeria has a low human development profile, among the lowest of the countries assessed in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The Human Development Index (HDI) measures the performance exhibited by a country across a range of indicators, looking past GDP to elements like life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, gender development, and even the rate of homicide. The HDI calculation represents an assessment that is a fairly comprehensive look at the current state of a nation and its people. Although Nigeria remains a country with low human development scores, but that score has at least shown a consistent upward trend since 2005, increasing by 13.1% from 2005 to 2017 . This essay provides an overview into the drivers of human development in Nigeria, exploring the elements within that nation contributing to the positive development it has displayed.
In a nation with significant resource wealth, one would think that economic wealth would result from that abundance. However, as Nigeria demonstrates, this rarely occurs in real world. Nigeria suffers from resource curse, a term for the economic, political, and social tribulations that are only found in nations wealthy in oil, gas, and minerals. Research into the human development in Nigeria has statistically demonstrated the likely presence of resource curse in Nigeria. That study also isolated several drivers of human development in that nation, like real income per capita, government educational financing, and private sector credit.
Another driver of human development in Nigeria concerns that nations political environment. In 2015, Nigeria’s national election found the President at the time, Goodluck Jonathan, replaced by another former Nigerian Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari. The era of Buhari’s former governance was after the military coup of 1983. He returned to governance with promises of reducing unemployment and addressing Boko Haram. The democratization rate is an important driver in Nigeria.
In business, several elements are drivers of Nigeria’s human development indices. The availability and quality of the skilled labor in Nigeria is a frustrating matter for employers in the country. Only 50% of the nation’s labor force can read, and that has worsened since 2005. Unemployed Nigerian’s face bleak prospects with many lacking basic skills, those upper level skills which would open the pathway out of poverty so far out of reach as to be inconceivable. These hopeless conditions and frustration at an unworkable circumstance drives long-term change.
Science and technology also offers many possibilities for Nigeria, serving as a human development driver. For example, the Nigerian government’s first uses of Big Data techniques resulted in the discovery of 24,000 workers on the government’s active payroll who were deceased, saving the government $11.5 million each year. In a country beset by so many challenges, that level of government capital saved represents a significant win for those that achieved it.
As Nigeria progresses forward, these elements and an array of others will hopefully drive the human development within the country to a much higher level. Examining the current state, the way forward is difficult to discover, but through persistence it is possible.
- ACCA (the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants). “50 Drivers of Change in the Public Sector,” 2016. http://www.accaglobal.com/content/dam/ACCA_Global/Technical/Future/pi-highlights-drivers-change-public-sector.pdf.
- National Resource Governance Institute. “The Resource Curse: The Political and Economic Challenges of Natural Resource Wealth.” NRGI, 2015.
- Ogbeide, Frank, and Hilary Kanwanye. “What Drives Human Development in Nigeria: Do Output Size, Financial Development and Resource Dependence Matter?” West African Journal of Monetary and Economic Integration 17, no. 2 (2017): 72–94.
- United Nations. “Human Development Reports – Nigeria.” HDRP, 2018. http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/NGA.
- Warami, Urowayino. “Nigeria’s Human Devt Index Rises by 13.1 % — UNDP.” Vanguard News (blog), April 18, 2017. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/04/nigerias-human-devt-index-rises-13-1-undp/.
