Nigeria's national Gini coefficient is 33.9. If you are sizing a consumer market, planning a retail rollout, or assessing financial inclusion across the country, that single number is often the starting point — and the ending point — of the analysis.
It shouldn't be. A national Gini coefficient is a population-weighted average across 230 million people, 36 states, and hundreds of cities with wildly different economic structures. Treating it as representative of "Nigeria" obscures more than it reveals.
To show what gets lost, we pulled proprietary city-level income distribution data for two of Nigeria's largest cities: Lagos and Kano.
Lagos is not what the headlines suggest
The common assumption is that Lagos — Nigeria's commercial capital, home to its stock exchange, its largest banks, and a fast-growing tech sector — represents the wealthy end of a national distribution that gets poorer as you move away from it.
The data tells a more interesting story. Lagos shares Nigeria's national Gini coefficient of 33.9 — by the standard inequality metric, Lagos looks exactly like the country as a whole. But its income distribution is nothing like the national picture. 39.9% of Lagos's population falls into the middle income bracket, roughly three times the national share of 13.1% — and its marginalised share, at 30.8%, is less than half the national figure of 67.2%. Lagos has built something the rest of the country largely has not: a substantial middle class.
At the same time, nearly a third of Lagos's population remains in the marginalised income bracket — a reminder that "wealthy megacity" and "large population living in poverty" are not mutually exclusive. Lagos is both more prosperous and more economically diverse than the national picture suggests.
Kano shares the same Gini — and a completely different reality
Kano, Nigeria's second-largest city and the commercial hub of the north, presents a starkly different picture. 74.3% of Kano's population sits in the marginalised income bracket — above even the national rate. 16.3% are in the low income bracket, 9.3% in the middle income bracket, and the upper-middle and high brackets combined are essentially negligible.
Kano's Gini coefficient — 33.9, identical to the national figure and to Lagos's — tells you none of this. Two cities, the same inequality metric, and utterly different income realities: one with a middle class approaching 40% of its population, the other with three-quarters of its residents below the poverty line.
This is the core problem with national averages: Lagos, Kano and Nigeria as a whole share essentially the same Gini coefficient — yet neither city's income distribution resembles "Nigeria" as a composite, or each other. A retail strategy, a credit risk model, or a market sizing exercise built on the national figure alone would be wrong for both cities, in different and offsetting ways — and the inequality metric would never warn you.
Why this matters for market entry and risk assessment
Consider three use cases where this distinction changes the answer:
Retail and FMCG market sizing
A consumer goods company sizing the addressable market for a mid-tier product in Nigeria using the national income distribution would significantly underestimate the Lagos opportunity — where roughly 40% of the population can afford mid-tier products — and significantly overestimate the Kano opportunity, where that segment is closer to 9%.
Financial inclusion and credit risk
A bank or fintech assessing credit risk for a new lending product needs to know not just the average income level, but the shape of the distribution in each market. A city with 40% middle income population supports a very different lending strategy than one with 9% — even when both cities sit in the same country with the very same Gini coefficient.
Real estate and infrastructure investment
Demand for mid-market housing, retail space, and services scales with the size of the middle income population — not the national average. Lagos's middle class is more than four times the size of Kano's as a share of population. Any investment thesis that doesn't account for this will misallocate capital.
This is why we built city-level data
Pan Africa Data has constructed proprietary income distribution data across three geographic layers — national, city (338 metropolitan areas) and locality/suburb (2,044 localities of 50,000 people or more) — across 49 African countries, covering population share, population count, and income bounds across five income classes, in three currencies. This is not aggregated from existing sources. It does not exist anywhere else.
The gap between Lagos and Kano is not unique to Nigeria. Cairo and Alexandria, Nairobi and Mombasa, Casablanca and Tangier — every African country has cities with meaningfully different income profiles that a national average cannot capture. For anyone making decisions about where to operate, who to lend to, or what to sell, the city is usually the unit that matters — not the country.
City & locality income data across 49 African countries
Proprietary income distribution across three layers — national, 338 cities and 2,044 localities/suburbs — in 49 African countries. Five income classes, three currencies, forecasts to 2035.
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