Beyond the Billions: Measuring Impact of Nigeria’s Huge Investment on Youths 

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Edited by Oke Epia, E-mail: sostainability01@gmail.com  | WhatsApp: +234 8034000706

Trends and Threads

By Augustina Augustine

Every August 12, International Youth Day in Nigeria feels less like a celebration and more like an audit. This year, that audit matters more than usual. In recent years, the federal government has rolled out, relaunched, or rebranded a dense alphabet of youth programmes: NIYA, NYIF, SUPA, iDICE, N-Power, etc. Each one of these comes with its own budget line, bureaucracy, press conference, and beneficiary count. What has been harder to find is the impact these actually have. Has the number of young Nigerians who wake up with dignified, income-generating work increased? 

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s overall unemployment rate was 4.3 percent by the second quarter of 2024, down from 5.3 percent in the first. Youth (aged 15–24) unemployment was 6.5 percent in that same quarter, having fallen from 8.4 percent earlier in the year. However, these official figures do not give any joy. In fact, they tend to attract disbelief. The State of the Nigerian Youth Report 2025, published by Plan International and ActionAid Nigeria and unveiled at a House of Representatives youth event, put youth unemployment at 53 percent, describing close to 80 million young Nigerians as jobless. The report noted that roughly 1.7 million graduates leave universities and polytechnics every year into a market that cannot absorb them.

The two sets of figures are not exactly contradictory: they are just measuring different indices and reflecting separate realities. The NBS counts anyone who works even one hour a week, including unpaid work on a family farm, as employed. By that yardstick, informal hawking, subsistence farming, and one-hour side gigs all count as “jobs.” And this is where the real story of Nigeria’s youth employment lives; not in the headline unemployment rate. Translated into plain language: most working-age Nigerians who report having “work” are underpaid, informally engaged, and just one bad season away from having nothing. This is the realistic yardstick against which each of the fanciful youth programmes of the government should be judged.

Flurry of Programmes and the Architecture of Empowerment

The National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Nigeria’s oldest labour-focused agency, has recently anchored its work in the Renewed Hope Employment Initiative (RHEI). Phase I, implemented in 2024, reportedly trained 32,886 unemployed Nigerians, with 4,683 resettled with business start-up support. Phase II reportedly trained a further 33,692 beneficiaries in market-driven skills, though as of mid-2025, none had been formally resettled, and 4,651 trainees were still owed outstanding stipends. NDE Director-General, Silas Agara, attributed this situation to the non-release of the 2025 capital budget. 

The Nigerian Youth Academy (NiYA), launched by President Bola Tinubu in March 2025, is the administration’s newest flagship, targeting digital literacy, technical skills, entrepreneurship, and creative-industry training for an ambitious 7 million young people. By December 2025, it had rolled out the NiYA Gigs platform and reportedly backed more than 200 youth-led ventures with ₦1 million each, alongside ₦500,000 grants to over 100 informal-sector operators. If these funds actually get to actual end-users, then this is money well-spent, even if still modest relative to the scale of the youth unemployment crisis.

The National Youth Investment Fund (NYIF) got a ₦110 billion approval in 2024 to relaunch what the Ministry of Youth Development called a cornerstone of youth entrepreneurship financing. The Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) runs perhaps the widest menu of interventions: a Conditional Grant Scheme offering ₦50,000 to micro-enterprises for formalisation; a Cluster Development Support programme to formalise 250,000 MSMEs nationwide; a ₦5 billion grant programme for student entrepreneurs that began disbursement in the North-West; and, most recently, the Inspire-Create-Start-and-Scale (ICSS) Grow Fund, launched in partnership with Jaiz Bank and German development cooperation to connect trained young entrepreneurs to actual financing rather than leaving them with a certificate and no capital.

The Bank of Industry (BOI), the government’s big-ticket development-finance vehicle, offers the clearest quantitative picture of any agency in this space and arguably the most encouraging one. In its first-ever Annual Development Impact Report, BOI disclosed total disbursements of ₦644.9 billion in 2025, supporting an estimated 1.68 million jobs. Youth-owned enterprises reportedly received ₦12 billion in direct financing. The bank says it achieved over 95 percent disbursement performance on the Federal Government’s ₦200 billion MSME Industrialisation Fund, and has begun deliberately reporting impact: jobs created, farmers linked to processing chains, enterprises retained rather than disbursement totals alone. It is a small but important shift in institutional culture which other youth-employment programmes would do well to emulate. The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) and Nigeria’s Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) have taken on new significance as the government leans into skills-based rather than certificate-based training. 

N-Power: A Case Study in Failed Empowerment

No programme better illustrates the gap between spending and impact than N-Power. Between 2016 and 2020 alone, the scheme is reported to have cost the Federal Government close to ₦475 billion, according to figures presented to the House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts. However, under President Tinubu, N-Power has been cut back due to reported corruption. In January 2024, the President suspended all programmes run by the National Social Investment Programme Agency (NSIPA), including N-Power, conditional cash transfers, and school feeding, pending an investigation into alleged mismanagement of funds, including a reported diversion of roughly ₦585 million by the supervising ministry. The suspension lasted well over a year in practical terms, leaving thousands of beneficiaries, some already owed nine to twelve months of stipends, without pay or clarity as to the next steps. By February 2025, the government lifted the freeze and promised to clear the backlog. By July 2025, following legal action from some beneficiaries and intervention by the national assembly, the government acknowledged a ₦81 billion arrears bill for stipends owed since 2022 and 2023, money that, officials admitted, had simply not been provided for in either the 2024 or 2025 budgets and had to be sourced through emergency service-wide votes. Separately, reports in 2024 pointed to unresolved obligations of around ₦108 billion connected to the same programme, with the agency’s own leadership unable to fully account for the delay. Thousands of young Nigerians genuinely worked as N-Power teachers, health aides, and agricultural extension volunteers. N-Power is a story about what happens when a government cannot answer, in real time, how much it owes, to whom, and why. That is an accountability failure as much as a funding one, and it is precisely the kind of failure that outcome-based monitoring and impact-focused reporting is designed to prevent.

Who Is Grading the Homework?

It is hard to tell if Nigeria has a single, unified system for measuring whether its youth-employment spending works. Responsibility is scattered across the Ministry of Youth Development (which runs NiYA and co-owns NYIF), the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment (which oversees the NDE), the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation through NSIPA (which ran N-Power until its suspension exposed serious gaps), the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment (which houses SMEDAN), and the Bank of Industry, which reports to its own board and, increasingly, to the presidency.

Each of these bodies publishes activity data about how many people were trained, how much billions in naira was disbursed, and how many businesses were “supported.” Far fewer publish outcome data: how many of those trained are still working in that field a year later; how many of those businesses are still operating, paying tax, employing others. In fact, no measurement of how much household income actually changed due to these programmes. The N-Power crisis happened, in part, because nobody outside NSIPA had a clear, continuously updated picture of what the agency was doing with its billions. BOI’s decision to publish a dedicated impact report, explicitly reframing success away from disbursement totals toward jobs created and enterprises sustained, stands out precisely because it is still the exception rather than the rule.

This matters because counting beneficiaries is easy and politically attractive, as a large number makes a good press release. But measuring outcomes is harder, slower, and occasionally embarrassing. But only outcomes tell you whether the ₦110 billion NYIF relaunch, the ₦644.9 billion BOI disbursed in a single year, or the ₦81 billion in N-Power arrears actually moved a meaningful number of young Nigerians out of poverty and into sustainable livelihoods. Nigeria needs an independent, cross-agency monitoring and evaluation framework with mandatory annual outcome reporting from every MDA running a youth programme, published in a single public dashboard rather than in scattered press statements.

What would outcome-based accountability actually look like in practice? At minimum, four things: tracking job placement and retention rates six and twelve months after any training programme, not just graduation numbers; tracking business survival rates at twelve and twenty-four months for every grant or loan scheme, the way BOI has begun to do; publishing disaggregated data by state, gender, and sector so that policy can respond to where interventions are or are not working; and subjecting disbursement figures to independent audit before they are announced, not years after beneficiaries have gone to court demanding to be paid. None of this requires new legislation so much as political will.