Nigeria’s human capital index at 36% limits economic growth

Numbers tell incredible stories that long speeches cannot deliver. The Human Capital Index score of 36% is one such number. It is the statistical summary of what is happening to millions of Nigerian children and communities and, ultimately, to the economy right now, across every region of this nation.

The World Bank’s Human Capital Index measures the productive potential that a child born today will reach by adulthood, given the education and healthcare available in their country. A score of 56% is the global benchmark, and Nigeria sits at 36%. That gap is not just a development challenge; it is a direct constraint on our economic growth. The evidence is visible in our classrooms, hospitals, factories, and office buildings across different geopolitical growths.

“Nigeria’s slow growth and stagnant living standards are not accidents but the legacy of unmet needs in education, health, and skills development.”

Nigeria’s education crisis is disheartening. Nationally, over 17 million children are currently out of school, a figure that should command permanent emergency status. Finland, Denmark and Norway put together are not up to that number. The above distribution reveals the structural growth problem Nigeria is facing.

If you travel across the northwest or the northeast, you will find communities where entire generations of children have never attended any formal education, not by choice but by circumstance. Poverty has forced most children into early labour or early marriage, and chronic underfunding has left those schools that remain standing without teachers, without materials, and without the basic conditions that learning requires.

Small businesses cannot scale because their owners were never equipped with the skills to do so. The digital economy we are racing toward remains inaccessible to populations that never received the foundational literacy to benefit from it.

The same applies to healthcare; an unhealthy workforce cannot be productive. This is not sentiment; it is physiology, and Nigeria’s health data translates directly into economic underperformance.

I can say that the most economically painful dimension of Nigeria’s human capital crisis is not what we have failed to build but what we have built and lost. The Japa phenomenon, the mass emigration of Nigeria’s educated professionals, represents a structural transfer of human capital investment from Nigeria to better-structured economies.

Over 17,600 Nigerian-trained doctors currently practise in the United Kingdom alone. A further 5,400 are in the United States. Between 2021 and 2022, 13,609 healthcare workers left Nigeria for the UK. Engineers, academics, IT professionals, and skilled entrepreneurs are still migrating at equally alarming rates.

The economic logic here is that Nigeria indirectly invests public funds in training a doctor through six years of medical school. That doctor, unable to earn a living wage or work with adequate equipment, relocates to the UK or Canada. The receiving country benefits from an educated professional it did not pay to train. Nigeria is left with both the cost of the training and the vacuum the migrant creates. This is happening at scale, across every geopolitical zone.

Nigeria’s slow growth and stagnant living standards are not accidents but the legacy of unmet needs in education, health, and skills development. Millions of children never learn to read or write, countless workers lack access to basic healthcare, professionals flee poor working conditions, and we all see talent suppressed before it can reach its prime. Together, these gaps form an invisible ceiling on the country’s potential. Research shows that extending effective schooling through secondary education would unlock much of the economy’s suppressed earning power and set Nigeria on a path to broader, more sustained prosperity.

Impressively, our government launched HCD 2.0, a human capital development programme with stated ambitions to move the HCI upward. This is a meaningful signal. But a signal without sustained funding and unrestricted private sector partnership will not move the needle on a challenge of this scale.

Nigeria should not treat human capital as a social sector concern but as the primary driver of economic competitiveness. Education and health budgets should increase and be disbursed as allocated. We in the private sector should move beyond lamenting the talent pipeline and begin co-investing in it through internships and industry-university partnerships.

The disparity in human capital outcomes in Nigeria is not a regional problem. It is a national economic challenge. No country can grow at its full potential when the majority of its significant population are operating far below their potential.

As of today, thirty-six percent is the number Nigeria scores on the World Bank Index. It is also the number that explains, more than any other single data point, why growth remains sluggish, why poverty persists, and why potential remains chronically unrealised. Moving that number upwards is not charity. It is the most important economic policy decision our leaders should make.

Deborah Yemi-Oladayo is the Managing Director of Proten International, a leading HR consulting firm in Nigeria, specialising in talent acquisition, learning and development, and HR advisory services. Email: [email protected]