Post by Henry Emeka (@Emekus)

Respectfully Nigerian youth and graduate employment since 1990
There is no official, comprehensive dataset that tracks the exact number of Nigerian youths and graduates who have secured good paying jobs since 1990. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and other agencies provide labor force and employment statistics, but they do not categorize jobs by “good paying” status or track individuals over decades.

Available labor market data
Labor force participation rate: Around 79–80% in recent years, with about 73% of the working-age population employed

Formal vs informal employment: Only about 7.3% of the labor force is in formal employment, while 92.7% are in the informal sector

Youth employment: The youth employment rate has fluctuated. In the 1990s, it was relatively higher due to economic growth and industrial expansion, but since 2014 it has declined, with unemployment peaking at 33.3% in 2021

Unemployment rate: 5.3% in Q1 2024, down from highs in the 2020s, but still above the global average

Population growth Nigeria’s population has grown from about 80 million in 1990 to over 240 million in 2026

Why “good paying” jobs are hard to quantify
Definition gap “Good paying” is subjective and not measured in official surveys.

Informal sector dominance: Most jobs are informal, often low-paid, so formal “good-paying” jobs are a small share.

No longitudinal tracking there is no national register of individuals’ employment history since 1990.

What we can infer in the 1990s, a larger proportion of youth were in formal or semi-formal jobs, especially in manufacturing, oil, and services, which could have included higher-paying roles.

Since 2010, especially after the 2020s, the share of youth in formal, high-paying jobs has likely declined due to economic challenges, sectoral shifts, and informalization of work.

Government SME initiatives and growth in tech, agriculture, and manufacturing have created some new opportunities, but these have not significantly offset the overall decline in formal youth employment

In summary while we cannot give an exact number of Nigerian youths and graduates with good-paying jobs since 1990, the available data shows that formal, high-paying jobs have been a small fraction of the labor market, and their share has likely decreased over time, especially since the 2010s.

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