Reimagining Nigeria’s Business Environment for Inclusive Growth
Nigeria’s private sector holds immense potential, but systemic frictions—regulatory inefficiencies, infrastructure gaps, and weak contract enforcement—continue to limit growth. This report offers a structural assessment of the business environment across five critical pillars, highlighting the urgent need for institutional reform. While recent policy efforts show intent, deeper, systemic change is required to unlock investment, drive innovation, and position the private sector as a key engine of national development. The time for coordinated, transformative reform is now.
Nigeria stands at a crossroads. Despite its status as Africa’s largest economy by population and a major investment destination, systemic barriers continue to impede private sector growth. This report critically examines Nigeria’s business environment, identifying five structural pillars; ease of doing business, regulatory coherence, corruption control, property rights enforcement, and the entrepreneurship ecosystem, as vital to unlocking economic transformation.
While past efforts such as the Start-up Act and PEBEC reforms signal progress, they have yet to meaningfully alter the day-to-day realities for most businesses. Persistent issues, ranging from regulatory fragmentation and multiple taxation to unreliable infrastructure, continue to stifle innovation, investment, and competitiveness.
This report argues that resilience amid dysfunction is not a development strategy. Nigeria’s entrepreneurial energy, while remarkable, requires a supportive and rules-based operating context to scale sustainably. The analysis goes beyond highlighting problems to offering actionable institutional reforms aimed at creating a transparent, predictable, and efficient business environment.
With rising global competition and tightening capital flows, Nigeria must reposition its private sector as a credible engine of growth and diversification. The stakes are high—but so is the potential. Access the full report to explore the path forward for private sector-led national development.
Click here to download the report: https://16thcouncil.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Reimagining-Nigerias-Business-Environment-for-Inclusive-Growth-.pdf
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