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 237 million people, 36 states, and 776 cities with wildly different economic structures. Treating it as representative of "Nigeria" obscures more than it reveals.
To show what gets lost, we pulled our 2025 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. 37.7% of Lagos's population falls into the middle income bracket, roughly three times the national share of 11.8% — and its marginalised share, at 33.5%, is about half the national figure of 69.6%. Lagos has built something the rest of the country largely has not: a substantial middle class.
At the same time, 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. 76.2% of Kano's population sits in the marginalised income bracket — well above even the national rate. 15.3% are in the low income bracket, 8.4% 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 38% 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 41% of the population can afford mid-tier products (middle-class or above) — and significantly overestimate the Kano opportunity, where that segment is closer to 8%.
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 41% middle-class-or-above population supports a very different lending strategy than one with 8% — 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-class population — not the national average. Lagos's middle-class household count is around 915,000; Kano's is around 68,000. That is a 13× gap in absolute market size, in the same country. Any investment thesis that doesn't account for this will misallocate capital.
The reform-window effect: every city just moved
Since we first published this analysis, Nigeria has moved through the fuel-subsidy removal and naira float that reshaped the macro landscape from mid-2023. That shock did not land evenly across cities. Between 2023 and 2025, every one of Nigeria's top-12 cities lost middle-class share: Lagos fell from 47.1% to 41.0%, Kano from 11.0% to 8.4%. Across those 12 cities alone, roughly 278,000 middle-class households moved down the income ladder in two years. Lagos took the biggest absolute hit (-115,000 households) precisely because it had the largest middle class to lose.
The floor may now be forming. Our 2026 model shows the national marginalised share falling for the first time since the reforms began — down 0.3 percentage points. But the point stands: city-level shifts move independently of the national inequality metric, and often faster than it does. The Gini didn't move meaningfully through the reform crunch. The middle class did.
This is why we built city-level data
Pan Africa Data has constructed income distribution data across three geographic layers — national, city 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, with forecasts to 2035.
The gap between Lagos and Kano is not unique to Nigeria. Cairo and Alexandria, Nairobi and Mombasa, Casablanca and Tangier, Lusaka and Kitwe — 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
Income distribution across three layers — national, city, and 2,044 localities/suburbs — in 49 African countries. Five income classes, three currencies, forecasts to 2035.
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