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Nigeria‘s gross domestic product (GDP) experienced growth of 3.4% in 2024, the highest rate since 2014 excluding the 2021-2022 COVID-19 rebound, according to the World Bank’s latest report published on Monday.
The growth was driven by the recovery of the oil and gas sector and significant advances in the tech and finance industries, as stated in the recent Nigeria Development Update.
However, the report also warns about the slow growth in Nigeria’s agriculture sector, attributed to security issues in the Middle Belt and rising production costs.
Describing a broad range across the central region of Nigeria, the Middle Belt has seen extensive farmland abandoned owing to ongoing violent conflicts between farmers and nomadic herdsmen. Meanwhile, the World Bank is forecasting a slight increase in Nigeria’s economic growth to 3.7% in 2025.
There have been praises for the government’s economic reforms by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), despite these reforms causing significant financial difficulties for many ordinary Nigerians. As a result of escalating inflation and food prices, poverty levels have surged, with the 2024 Global Hunger Index indicating that Nigeria now holds the world’s second-highest number of poor people after India.
Unemployment remains high, and labor incomes have not kept pace with inflation, eroding the spending power of Nigerians, the World Bank acknowledged. Despite hopes that inflation will drop this year, it is set to remain high. As a result, there is a critical need to create more and better job opportunities at scale to reduce poverty, particularly if Nigeria wants to achieve its goal of becoming a trillion-dollar economy by 2030.
