Assessment of Public Employment Services in Nigeria

Despite having Africa’s largest economy and a growing youthful population Nigeria’s employment and labour productivity growth is low by international standards. A number of challenges including the structure of the economy, poor labour market transparency and chronic skills mismatches have contributed to perennially high rates of unemployment, underemployment and low productivity.

Nigeria’s Federal Government has recognized the importance of building an effective skills and employment service ecosystem to help overcome these challenges and to build an inclusive, sustainable labour market fit for the twenty-first century. In 2002, it set out a range of measures in a National Employment Policy, revised in 2017, which included equipping citizens with the skills demanded by the economy, improving the matching of labour supply and demand and improving labour market transparency though better data gathering.

An important plank to facilitate employment growth centred on the development of a physical employment service infrastructure underpinned by a digital job-matching portal, the National Electronic Labour Exchange (NELEX), with the aim of matching supply and demand, providing a source of labour market information to users and generating labour market information to guide strategy and planning.

This assessment sits under the overarching Promoting Employment in Nigeria project (PEN), funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, the German agency for international cooperation), which was launched to ‘enhance the institutional capacity for providing labour market information and services (LMIS) in Nigeria’.