Nigeria’s ambition to grow into a $1tn economy by 2050 may rely less on oil prices, infrastructure expansion, or macroeconomic reforms than on a quieter and often overlooked investment: the wellbeing of its youngest citizens. SAMI TUNJI examines how the country’s long-term productivity path is being influenced long before children step into classrooms or the labour market
At a high-level policy dialogue on early childhood, productivity, and Nigeria’s Growth Choices held in Abuja, economists, alongside academic and policy experts, argued that the country’s long-term productivity trajectory is being shaped long before children enter classrooms or labour markets.
The early years lead at the World Bank, Dr Ritgak Tilley-Gyado, warned that Nigeria’s ambition of a $1tn economy by 2050 will rise or fall on what happens long before children reach Primary 1.
SBM Intelligence hosted the dialogue with the World Bank and local think tanks, and the framing was clear: productivity gaps can form before age five and weaken growth for decades.
Tilley-Gyado placed the timeline where policymakers rarely look. The children aged 0 to 5 today will be 15 to 21 by 2050. That cohort will be entering the labour force or be close to it. If those young Nigerians arrive with weak foundations in health, nutrition, early learning, and emotional development, the country will not be debating how to share prosperity. It will be negotiating how to survive a drag on productivity that is already locked in.
“Early childhood investment is not social spending. It is an economic strategy,” she said. She also argued that policy silos are a major part of the problem, because children do not experience life as separate ministries. Health, nutrition, sanitation, safety, and early learning interact in the same body and the same household. When government action is fragmented, outcomes remain fragile even when parents try.
The economic case is backed by a growing body of global evidence. Tilley-Gyado cited estimates that each dollar spent in the early years can yield returns of up to $13 through higher productivity, earnings, and lower social costs over time. A similar logic appears in global education and development work that links early childhood care and education to strong lifetime benefits and measured economic returns.
Yet Nigeria’s own human capital metrics show how large the gap is. A widely cited World Bank Human Capital Project summary for Nigeria states that a child born in the country will be only 36 per cent as productive as they could be with full health and complete education. That is not an abstract index. It is a warning about future output per worker, future tax capacity, and future competitiveness.
The productivity leak before Primary 1
The managing partner at SBM Intelligence, Ikemesit Effiong, described Nigeria’s early years as a challenge in economic language that is hard to ignore. By the time a child starts Primary 1, many determinants of future productivity have already been shaped by conditions during pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood, he said. He called it a “productivity crisis that arrives 20 years before someone first searches for a job”.
He anchored this argument in survival and growth data. Citing the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey, Effiong said under-five mortality had fallen to about 110 deaths per 1,000 live births from 132 in 2018, but neonatal mortality remained around 41 per 1,000 live births. He also said roughly 40 per cent of children under five are stunted. “These are not just health statistics,” he argued. They are signals about “the future workforce, future taxpayers and future innovators” Nigeria will have or not have.
The stunting figure matters because stunting is not only short height. It reflects chronic deprivation during sensitive windows for brain and body development. Across multiple global analyses, childhood stunting is linked to poorer cognitive development, weaker school outcomes, and lower adult earnings. A widely cited synthesis notes that adults who were stunted as children earn about 20 per cent less and are more likely to remain in poverty. That is how nutrition becomes macroeconomics.
Then there is the learning crisis, which does not begin at age ten. It begins when children arrive at school without readiness, language stimulation, or stable health. According to the World Bank, learning poverty is the inability to read and understand a simple text by age 10. It also noted that learning poverty has risen sharply in low- and middle-income countries, reaching an estimated 70 per cent of 10-year-olds.
The Head of Strategic Partnerships at WaterAid Nigeria, Emmanuel Iorkumbur, linked early childhood outcomes directly to the conditions children grow up in. Using survival indicators (NDHS 2024), he highlighted a stunting prevalence of 40 per cent among under-fives, a learning poverty rate of 70 per cent, and an under-five mortality rate of 110 per 1,000 live births. According to him, survival, learning, and productivity risks cluster in the same early-life window, and WASH conditions are part of the pathway that shapes whether children arrive in school ready to learn or already behind.
Economically, this challenge manifests as weak productivity and a limited capacity to convert economic inputs into output. A consultant at Nextier, Chidimma Obi, noted that Nigeria’s growth challenge reflects not only constraints in capital accumulation or labour supply but also “limitations in how effectively available inputs are translated into output”. Worker capabilities, she explained, influence how efficiently capital is utilised and how well firms adopt and operate new technologies, both of which are key determinants of total factor productivity.
Last-mile systems decide who thrives
When Dr Tosin Olorunmoteni, a paediatric neuroscientist at Obafemi Awolowo University, spoke about early childhood development, she did not start with budgets. She started with biology and timing. “The early years of children are very important for their optimal wellbeing,” she said, stressing that the risks begin from conception and even before pregnancy. She also pointed to the speed of early brain development. “Within the first few months of life, about one million neurones are formed every second.”
If the environment is hostile, the brain is wired for survival, not for learning.
Olorunmoteni’s framing fits the World Health Organisation nurturing care approach, which links five domains that must work together: good health, adequate nutrition, responsive caregiving, safety and security, and opportunities for early learning. She said that these domains are the centre of early childhood development. The point is practical. One cannot “fix” learning poverty later if babies are underfed, frequently ill, unsafe, and unstimulated now.
This is where last-mile realities bite. The representative from WaterAid treated WASH failure as an economic constraint, not just a service delivery gap. In his breakdown of the “Total Cost of Illness” related to diarrhoeal disease, his central message was that the highest costs are not what households or governments pay at the clinic. The dominant costs come from lost productivity linked to premature deaths and illness-related work disruption. As his slide put it, “The majority of the economic burden (93 per cent) comes from productivity losses.”
He paired this with a cost-category table that assigned the largest shares to productivity losses from mortality and morbidity, while direct medical and transport costs were a much smaller part of the total. When children are sick, parents miss work. When children die, the country loses future workers. That is what “structural barrier to productivity” means in practice.
A programme manager of Family Healthcare and Climate-Health at Clinton Health Access Initiative, Nnamdi Ude, argued that developmental risks are common, often invisible, and time-sensitive. Screening tied to referral and support can help systems act early, when remediation is cheaper and more effective.
Policies everywhere, but the child still falls through
The Country Director of DAI Global, Dr Joe Abah, put Nigeria’s early childhood dilemma in a stark choice. “You either have a demographic benefit or a demographic disaster,” he said, warning that failure to focus on children pushes the country toward disaster. This links directly to Tilley-Gyado’s caution that young populations do not automatically produce prosperity. “Demographics alone do not guarantee prosperity,” she said. Youth become an asset only when children develop the capabilities to thrive as adults.
It is crucial to note that Nigeria is not short of policies. Abah observed a strong legal base through the Child Rights Act and multiple ECD-relevant policies. Yet he argued delivery remains weak because of fragmented coordination platforms, weak alignment between states and local governments, siloed reporting systems, workforce gaps, and weak enforcement of standards. He also highlighted the lack of a consistent apex mechanism that oversees all five domains of nurturing care in a unified way.
That governance gap is exactly how a multi-sector problem becomes a multi-sector orphan.
Obi of Nextier described this as a system coordination gap in early childhood capability formation. Early childhood outcomes, she noted, are produced across multiple sectors, including health, nutrition, education, and social protection, but these inputs are often delivered through separate institutional channels rather than coordinated child-level interventions. In plain terms, a stunted child can be seen by health services without being linked to early learning support. A child struggling in school can be invisible to nutrition and protection services. Administrative data may identify early-life vulnerabilities, yet coordinated service delivery depends on alignment across mandates, budgets, planning, and reporting systems across federal, state, and local government levels.
Financing mirrors this fragmentation. The Deputy Country Director of BudgIT, Vahyala Kwaga, argued that Nigeria invests less than five per cent of public spending on direct early childhood development services, with limited visibility and fragmented arrangements across sectors.
“Financing is a major barrier for ECD, as Nigeria invests less than five per cent of public spending (budget) on direct ECD services, with limited budget visibility, reporting and fragmented multi-sectoral arrangements.
“Despite these gaps, initiatives such as the Basic Health Care Provision Fund, UBEC pre-primary grants and donor-supported programmes offer opportunities to strengthen ECD,” he said.
Iorkumbur of WaterAid also anchored his argument in financing, warning that weak investment is leaving gaps that undermine both human capital and long-run growth. He said, “Revitalising the WASH sector is a prerequisite for any meaningful advancement in Nigeria’s Human Capital Index and long-term Gross Domestic Product.” He then quantified the shortfall in budgeted resources. “Out of the N1.091tn required for prioritised WASH projects, only N241.2bn has been budgeted,” he said, adding that this reflects “a severe shortfall in investment” that threatens to derail the country’s human capital objectives.
The way forward
There is a way out, but it is not another policy document. It is a shift in how the country treats early childhood as core economic infrastructure with unified oversight, tagged budgets, measurable results, and integrated last-mile delivery that follows the child across sectors.
Abah recommended the establishment of a high-level oversight platform to strengthen coordination and accountability in early childhood development governance across ministries and tiers of government. He also recommended a review of the 2007 National Policy for Integrated ECD to create a unified multisectoral framework, alongside improved financing mechanisms through budget tagging, pooled funding and results-based models that reward better outcomes for children. Abah further advocated the adoption of a unified ECD results framework supported by scorecards and public dashboards to enhance transparency, while urging that all interventions be guided by a child-centred service design that prioritises the best interests of the child.
Kwaga called for the development of a dedicated national framework to coordinate early childhood development policies, stressing the need for a legally backed implementation plan that clearly assigns responsibilities across federal, state and local governments with measurable targets. He also urged the government to introduce explicit budget lines for child nutrition at both federal and state levels, while establishing community-based ECD hubs that integrate early learning, health, nutrition and parental support services. Kwaga further recommended stronger outcome-based monitoring that links public spending to developmental results alongside equity-focused programmes targeted at underserved communities and designed to address barriers faced by girls.
