With a predominantly youthful population and an emerging socio-economic development momentum in Africa, Nigeria has a significant opportunity to secure a prominent role in global emergence in the forthcoming decades. However, the realization of this potential hinges on the effective development and deployment of human capital capable of steering the nation’s progress. Given its role as the primary source of human capital in Nigeria, the education sector assumes heightened importance in the coming decades. Unfortunately, this sector has been besieged by numerous challenges, resulting in gaps that compromise the nation’s human capital. These challenges can be broadly categorized into three groups:

• The Access Gap

• The Quality Gap

• The Outcome Gap

A comprehensive examination of the access gap, encompassing challenges hindering the average Nigerian’s access to education, has been outlined in the provided document HERE.

Additionally, the quality gap, addressing the challenges that undermine the capacity of available education to adequately equip individuals, has been analyzed HERE. The outcome gap delves into the human capital implications arising from both limited access and low-quality education. This policy brief focuses specifically on the outcome gap, offering insights into its realities, ongoing solutions, and identified gaps. Furthermore, the brief presents policy recommendations aimed at bridging the gap and fostering positive outcomes in education.

Understanding the Outcome Gap

The outcome gap can be understood in 5 related challenges:

•  Education Transition Challenge

The Nigerian education system operates on a hierarchical structure, where progression between education levels is not automatic. Learners can advance to the next stage only upon demonstrating mastery outcomes, typically through standardized examinations. For instance, primary school students must pass entrance exams to qualify for secondary school, and tertiary institutions require a minimum number of WAEC* subject passes and UTME* scores for admission.

Poor outcomes at any educational level pose an additional hurdle to accessing higher education. Between 2016 and 2023, the percentage of students meeting the minimum 5- subject WAEC pass, a prerequisite for university admission, ranged from 53% to 79.8%. Consequently, at least one in every four high school students during this period was denied the opportunity to transition to higher education solely based on subpar outcomes, aggravating the challenges of education access and contributing to the leaky education pipeline—the progressive reduction in access to education as one ascends the tiers of education. Current strategies to address this transition challenge include a deliberate reduction of barriers between educational tiers. For instance, the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has incrementally lowered the minimum UTME score required for university admission, from 180 in the 2009 admission cycle to 140 in the 2023 admission cycle. However, this has prompted public outcry, with education experts cautioning that continued reductions may compromise academic performance in tertiary institutions.

• Education and Industry Disconnect

A major public critic of tertiary education particularly is its disconnect from the industry. Although the academia is expected to play the role of both a human capital supplier and a research-based innovation kickstarter for industries, this has not being the much of the case of Nigerian tertiary education. Students in higher education have limited exposure to the industry, and tertiary education curriculum places a major focus on academic content over helping students develop employable skills. The lack of research financing has also made it difficult for higher education institutions to lead the innovation trail as expected. To address the disconnect, various stakeholders at several levels have being implementing diverse solutions. The Federal Government instituted the Student Industrial Work Experience Scheme in 1974 through the Industrial Training Fund (ITF). SIWES was created to bridge the gap between the classroom and the industry by preparing students with the appropriate skills necessary for employment in Nigerian industries. The scheme however mostly caters to students within the STEM disciplines, with some inclusion of Agriculture, Medical Sciences and Education students. There has also been criticism of the effectiveness of the scheme based on the short duration, inability to transition to actual employment, poor matching of student placements, insufficient participating industries, and insufficient funding.

On a relatively local scale, some universities have created special strategies to connect the classroom with the industry. An example, the Vice Chancellor of University of Abuja as at August 2023 reports the university’s attempt to bridge the academia-industry disconnect through special strategies like creating industry-supported programmes within the University. The VC also reported the university’s plan to create an academic head of department and an industry head of department for its department of Mining and Geology as another example of actively involving the industry in the academic environment.

• Employment Challenge

Education holds two significant promises: social mobility, enabling individuals to enhance their socioeconomic status, and social efficiency, furnishing the necessary human capital to contribute to societal development. However, the current state of education in Nigeria poses increasing challenges to realizing these promises. The adverse employment outcomes resulting from limited access and low-quality education manifest in three ways: unemployment, underemployment, and unemployability. Unemployment denotes a complete lack of suitable job opportunities for individuals willing and able to work, while underemployment involves occupying positions that underutilize employees’ skills and compensate them inadequately. Unemployability, on the other hand, describes situations where a person is deemed unsuitable for employment and unable to retain a job, often stemming from a mismatch between the skills possessed by an educated individual and those required for the sought-after positions (Obor and Kayode, 2021).

Unemployment poses a significant and enduring challenge in Nigeria, primarily driven by a scarcity of job opportunities and exacerbated by global factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past decade, the unemployment rate has seen a steady increase. In the fourth quarter of 2020, it reached 33.3%. However, in the first quarter of 2023, the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revised its methodology for calculating the unemployment rate, publishing a revised figure of 4.1%. The updated system now considers employed persons as those in paid jobs who worked for at least one hour per week, a departure from the previous threshold of 20 hours per week. Despite the NBS asserting alignment with the International Labour Organization (ILO) guidelines, this revision has faced criticism from the Nigerian public. The NBS had previously reported an underemployment rate of 20.1% in Q3 2018 and 13.7% in Q4 2022. Under the revised system, the NBS now defines underemployment as a proportion of employed individuals working fewer than 40 hours per week, declaring themselves willing and available for more work, with a updated rate of 12.2% in Q1 2023.

Notably, there is a lack of comprehensive nationwide measures for unemployability in Nigeria. Its impact is observed in the paradoxical combination of unemployed graduates alongside reported shortages of skilled human resources by employers in the country. This situation has prompted a noticeable trend of labor recruitment from other countries by Nigerian-based companies, exemplified by the employment of 11,000 Indians in the newly constructed Dangote refinery, partially funded by the NNPC. The ensuing controversy has triggered a public debate on the unemployability challenge in Nigeria.