“The most critical country for the future of sub-Saharan Africa is Nigeria.”
When Bill Gates made the above statement earlier this year at the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Forum 2025, he captured what economists, demographers, and security experts have long understood. Africa’s future — its prosperity, stability, and influence — will depend above all on what happens in Nigeria.
With an estimated 231 million people in 2023, Nigeria accounts for close to one fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s population. By 2050, with a population of 440 million people, Nigeria will be the third most populous country in the world after India and China. Such demographic weight carries both promise and pressure: the opportunity to turn a young, ambitious population into an engine of growth, productivity and innovation or the risk of holding back an entire continent.
Nigeria’s economic heft is equally consequential. Between 1990 and 2023, the country’s GDP increased from US$118 billion to US$423 billion, accounting for over a fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s total economic output.
On its current trajectory, projections based on the International Futures forecasting system (Ifs) from the University of Denver, suggest a near tripling to US$1.3 trillion by 2050, maintaining its position as Africa’s largest economy, with a projected average annual growth rate of 4.2%. However, this positive outlook hinges on addressing longstanding constraints to growth. These include inadequate infrastructure, unreliable power supply, trade barriers, an unfriendly business environment and insecurity, among other structural issues.
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The Tinubu administration’s macroeconomic reforms, including the removal of fuel subsidies, exchange rate unification, and tighter monetary policy, were not only necessary but long overdue. They created conditions for longer-term economic stability and improved investor confidence, even if short-term effects included higher inflation and living costs. Nigeria’s growth trajectory remains fragile and vulnerable to global economic fluctuations. And this is more than a Nigerian affair: a fifth of sub-Saharan Africa’s economy moving in one direction or another will tilt the continental balance — for better or worse.
Economic scale tells only part of the story. Nigeria’s human reality mirrors the continent’s broader contradictions: deep-seated poverty despite significant resources and economic potential. In 2022, around 71 million Nigerians lived in extreme poverty when applying the international poverty line of US$2.15 a day, accounting for 16 per cent of Africa´s poor.
This means that about every 6th poor African is Nigerian, and by 2050, it could be nearly every 5th. The implication is dramatic: even with progress elsewhere, the overall success in reducing extreme poverty on the continent will be defined by how effectively Nigeria can lift its most vulnerable citizens out of poverty and exclusion.
The same pattern holds for sub-Saharan Africa’s working-age population and its youth. Nigeria’s labour force, around 137 million people in 2023, is projected to almost double to 268 million by 2050, increasing its share of the total from 10 per cent to over 12 per cent. As for the continent’s youth, roughly every one in five young Africans is Nigerian.
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Nigeria’s age structure is among the youngest on the continent, with 50 per cent being younger than 19. Whether that generation becomes a source of dynamism or concern with drastic implications for stability and security in Nigeria and elsewhere on the globe, will depend on strategic investments to boost human capital.
These include improving health, education and skills development, as well as job creation; areas where Nigeria’s ability to make meaningful progress will echo far beyond its borders. Likewise, persistent lack of economic opportunities and exclusion drive crime and radicalisation, phenomena that spill over borders and can destabilise entire regions. Nigeria’s serious governance challenges, primarily poor capacity, mismanagement and corruption compound those risks. Therefore, strengthening governance is an imperative, and reform-minded actors within and outside government need to advance transparency, bolster accountability and promote citizen inclusion.
For Nigeria to succeed, efforts to secure macroeconomic stability need to go hand in hand with comprehensive policy reforms and strategic investments in priority sectors. Other than strengthening governance and improving human capital, these should target bridging the infrastructure gap, enhancing private sector development, increasing agricultural productivity with climate-smart technology and accelerating economic diversification. This includes reforming manufacturing for labour-intensive, resource-based industrialisation and exports. It also means fully implementing the African Continental Free Trade Area to support long-term growth.
In the face of drastic inequality, the government needs to ensure that economic growth benefits the poor to reduce poverty sustainably. In the past, Nigeria has experienced cycles of more than decent economic growth that nevertheless did not lead to job creation or meaningful poverty reduction. Such policy failures must never be repeated. Moreover, security needs to be strengthened by improving capacity, intelligence and coordination alongside socioeconomic interventions.
Lastly, Nigeria’s influence is not confined to demography or economics. The country also wields unmatched cultural and political reach. Its creative industries have propelled African creativity onto the global stage. Politically, Nigeria’s leadership within ECOWAS and the African Union often sets the tone for West African stability and regional cooperation. When Nigeria moves with confidence, so too does much of the continent. When it falters, the effects are rarely contained within its frontiers.
Bill Gates is right. For Africa to thrive, Nigeria must prosper. The ignition the country needs is not a single spark but a sustained commitment to governance reform, inclusive economic growth, and strategic investment in human capital.
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Dr Julia Bello-Schünemann is Senior Associate, Good Governance Africa (GGA-Nigeria). She holds a PhD in International Relations from the Universidad Complutense, Madrid and has held senior research positions in various organisations, including at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria. Her expertise includes integrated forecasting and trend analysis.
