Policy Brief & Alerts

Recent evidence suggests that the Nigerian economy has entered 2026 with the weight of a hard-won stabilisation and rising structural fragility. This transition follows the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) implementation of several reforms since March 2023. Specifically, the CBN cleared the $7 billion backlog of verified foreign exchange obligations. Inherited in September 2023, settling the residual balance and announcing full clearance in March 2024, following an independent audit by Deloitte Consulting to verify the legitimacy of claims. The CBN also launched a banking sector recapitalisation programme in March 2024, requiring banks to meet substantially higher minimum paid-up share capital thresholds by 31 March 2026.” At the close of the programme, the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed that 33 of Nigeria’s 37 banks had met the revised minimum capital requirements, with N4.65 trillion raised in aggregate. 
It also allowed the naira to float under a unified, market-driven foreign exchange framework. In addition, the removal of the long-standing fuel subsidy to eliminate a structural fiscal drain also created conditions that generated substantial inflationary pressure.” Moreover, evidence indicates that the foreign exchange reserves recovered substantially, inflation began moderating after a substantial spike, and the manufacturing sector posted predominantly expansionary but uneven PMI readings throughout 2025.
However, analysis points out that Nigeria’s Central Bank now faces a dilemma that those reforms could not resolve. On the one hand, consistently raising monetary policy rates compounds and starves productive investment in real sectors already under severe structural constraints. On the other hand, cutting policy rates risks capital flight. In this light, this article argues that the interaction effects of the four unresolved structural failures in Nigeria’s financial sector, energy sector, manufacturing sector, and fiscal policy have made the monetary policy rate (MPR) a blunt and often less effective instrument.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), Africa's landmark regional trade agreement, has the potential to expand intra-African trade and create new economic opportunities, including for women traders. However, achieving these gains requires more than reducing tariffs. Women traders continue to face persistent barriers to participation, including limited access to information, weak institutional support, and concerns about the safety and governance of digital trade systems. This policy brief draws on findings from a randomised survey experiment involving 586 women traders in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria. The study examined whether providing information about the AfCFTA, with and without additional messaging on data governance and digital privacy, influenced women's trust in digital trade systems and willingness to engage in cross-border trade. The findings show that AfCFTA information increased women's confidence in digital trade systems but did not increase their willingness to trade. When information on data governance and digital privacy was added, both digital trust and willingness to trade declined. These findings suggest that awareness alone is insufficient to increase women's participation in AfCFTA-enabled trade. Strengthening data governance, building trust in digital trade infrastructure, and ensuring gender-responsive institutional protections are essential for inclusive AfCFTA implementation.

This brief was authored by:
Evans Osabuohien, Professor of Economics at Covenant University, Ota 
and Thelma Obiakor, Research Fellow at CSEA.

Summary

Northern Nigeria faces a growing resilience deficit as climate shocks, conflict, and economic instability converge, exposing households to repeated crises that erode livelihoods and deepen poverty. Despite existing policies on disaster management, social protection, and climate adaptation, responses remain largely reactive, focusing on relief rather than strengthening households’ ability to anticipate, absorb, and recover from shocks. Drawing on recent research, this policy brief argues for an integrated resilience system linking early warning, anticipatory action, adaptive social protection, and livelihood recovery. Lessons from sub-Saharan Africa highlight the importance of coordinated institutions, predictable financing, and shock-responsive systems to build lasting resilience.

Key messages

1. Northern Nigeria is increasingly exposed to overlapping climate hazards, conflict and economic shocks that repeatedly erode household assets, livelihoods and resilience.

2. Current disaster risk management and social protection systems remain largely reactive, with limited coverage, delayed financing and weak coordination, reducing their effectiveness in protecting vulnerable households before shocks occur.

3. Nigeria requires an integrated resilience system that links early warning, pre-arranged financing, adaptive social protection and timely livelihood recovery.

4. Strengthening resilience will require scaling up anticipatory action, expanding adaptive social protection, integrating livelihood recovery into existing programmes, and adopting conflict-sensitive climate responses supported by stronger institutional coordination and more predictable financing.

5. Greater political commitment, stronger coordination and sustained financing are also needed to transform systems into a coherent, shock-responsive resilience architecture.


This study, first published HERE, was developed by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network, represented institutionally by the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa and the Institute of Development Studies.
The authors are grateful to the FCDO, particularly the Data and Evidence to end Extreme Poverty (DEEP) programme, for financial support. DEEP is funded by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) through its Global Research and Technology Development portfolio. The author’s views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of FCDO.
Authorship: Adedeji Adeniran, Vidya Diwakar and Jamilu Ilyasu.

Digital safety programming across Africa, and specifically in Nigeria, is often built on the widely held assumption that merely equipping women with digital skills will shield them from online violence. This policy brief, based on the report of the TFVAWG-CSEA-AEGIS project, empirically tests that assumption. The findings reveal a paradox with insightful implications for digital development policies and programming. Using configurational methodologies, specifically Crisp-set and Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA and fsQCA), the research reveals that higher digital literacy consistently appears in every pathway leading to TFVAWG, rather than operating as a straightforward protective factor. Hence, constituting a paradoxical situation where the heaviest burden of Technology Facilitated Violence Against Women and Girls (TFVAWG) falls not on the digitally impoverished but on the digitality literate. Digital literacy was found to combine with conditions such as young age and heavy online presence as a reliable pathway to TFVAWG.

A compelling global consensus has formed around achieving Net-Zero emissions as the indispensable framework for collective climate action. This framework, which aims to balance greenhouse gases emitted with those removed from the atmosphere, is grounded in the Paris Agreement's objective of limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C. It provides a common language and a set of quantifiable targets that shape national policy, international finance, and corporate strategy. The urgency for this framework is clear: between 1990 and 2023, annual energy-related CO₂ emissions surged from 20.5 to 37.3 gigatonnes, with the global per capita average standing at 4.67 tonnes in 2023.

Author: Ezra Ihezie