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 has a Gini coefficient of 28.0 — meaningfully lower than Nigeria's national figure of 33.9. Lagos is more equal than the country as a whole, not because poverty is absent, but because Lagos has built something the rest of the country largely has not: a substantial middle class. 27.8% of Lagos's population falls into the middle income bracket, compared to roughly 7% nationally.
At the same time, 40.7% 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 looks like the national average — almost exactly
Kano, Nigeria's second-largest city and the commercial hub of the north, presents a starkly different picture. 90.2% of Kano's population sits in the marginalised income bracket. Only 7.1% are in the low income bracket, and a combined 2.6% occupy the middle and high income brackets — essentially negligible.
Kano's Gini coefficient of 34.86 is close to the national figure of 33.9 — but the income distribution looks nothing like a smaller version of Nigeria. It is a city where the overwhelming majority of the population sits in a single income bracket, with almost no middle class to speak of.
This is the core problem with national averages: Lagos and Kano have similar-looking Gini coefficients to the national figure in one case and a markedly different one in the other — but neither city's income distribution resembles "Nigeria" as a composite. 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.
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 28% of the population can afford mid-tier products — and significantly overestimate the Kano opportunity, where that segment is closer to 3%.
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 28% middle income population supports a very different lending strategy than one with 3%, even if both cities sit in the same country with the same national statistics.
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 roughly nine 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 for 509 cities across 51 African countries — covering population share, population count, and income bounds across four income classes, in three currencies, with city-specific Gini coefficients. 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.
Beta access opens 17 June 2026
Proprietary income distribution data for 509 cities across 51 African countries. Four income classes, three currencies, forecasts to 2035.
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