Apprenticeship as a Critical Path to Human Development

There is a quiet but consequential shift underway in Nigerian economic policy. After decades of treating the private sector as an external constituency to be courted and occasionally taxed, the federal and state governments are increasingly framing private enterprise as the principal delivery vehicle for national development — with government as the enabler, regulator, co-investor, and risk partner. The February 2026 cooperation agreement between the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning and the International Finance Corporation, designed to mobilise a multi-billion-dollar pipeline of Public-Private Partnership projects across transport, energy, technology and sanitation, is the clearest signal yet that this shift has moved from rhetoric to architecture. [1]

The 2025 sectoral performance data from the National Bureau of Statistics, computed by NESG Research, reveals a dual economy. A handful of sectors like Transportation & Storage (16.9%), Finance & Insurance (14.5%), Water (10.0%), Other Mining (9.7%), Arts & Entertainment (9.0%), Oil & Gas (8.5%), Electricity (8.5%) and ICT (6.9%) are expanding at rates that, sustained, could transform the country within a decade. Alongside them, the economy's heaviest sectors by share of GDP like Agriculture (27.6%, growing at 2.9%), Trade (17.4%, growing at 1.8%), Real Estate (13.6%, growing at 3.8%) and Manufacturing (8.1%, growing at only 1.4%) which are barely keeping pace with population growth. Public Administration (2.0%), Education (2.4%) and Human & Health (2.5%) are similarly sluggish. [1][2]