How do you prepare millions of young people for an economy that cannot provide enough salaried jobs? That question sits at the heart of Nigeria's higher-education challenge.

Over the past two decades, university enrolment in Nigeria has risen sharply, from roughly 448,000 students in the 1999/2000 academic session to more than 2.15 million in 2019. The pressure keeps building: Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, with United Nations estimates putting its population above 220 million and its median age under 20 — one of the youngest national populations in the world. For generations, higher education has been viewed as a pathway to better economic prospects. A degree could open the door to professional, white-collar and salaried employment and, ultimately, a more stable middle-class life.

But Nigeria's labour market cannot absorb most workers into formal, salaried employment. In Q1 2024, 92.7% of employed Nigerians were in informal employment and about 84% were self-employed, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NLFS Q1 2024 report). Informality at this scale is not unique to Nigeria — the International Labour Organization estimates that the large majority of employment across Sub-Saharan Africa is informal — but Nigeria's population size makes the absolute numbers enormous.

That reality changes what higher education has to prepare young people for. A university education cannot be built only around the expectation that graduates will find salaried employment. Young people also need the ability to identify economic opportunities, build and sustain ventures, adapt to changing markets and, where possible, create jobs for themselves and others.

Nearly two decades of entrepreneurship education

Nigeria's higher-education regulators have embedded entrepreneurship education within tertiary curricula, with universities and other tertiary institutions developing entrepreneurship centres, innovation hubs and incubators.

That uptake is largely by design. The National Universities Commission has required entrepreneurship as a compulsory component of undergraduate study through its benchmark academic standards, making it a standard part of university training rather than an elective niche.

According to the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Landscape Within Higher Education Institutions in Nigeria report by EyeCity Africa and the National Universities Commission (NUC), 45% of surveyed institutions have supported entrepreneurship education for six to ten years, while another 40% have been doing so for more than ten years. Only 15% have been doing so for less than five years. In other words, 85% of the institutions surveyed have had at least six years to build, implement and refine their entrepreneurship programmes.

Unfortunately, compliance does not tell the full story of effectiveness. Despite the high rate of adoption, concerns remain about the quality and practical impact of entrepreneurship education.

What is preventing entrepreneurship education from translating into viable ventures?

The first challenge is the gap between being taught entrepreneurship and being able to practise it. The report finds that while entrepreneurship education is widespread in Nigerian universities, most programmes provide research and training, with only 31.58% providing hands-on support for developing and testing early-stage research or innovation ideas. To learn and apply, students need the opportunity to test ideas, build prototypes, work with customers, fail, iterate and understand what it takes to move an idea beyond the four walls of a classroom.

The same challenge appears further down the pipeline. Innovation hubs are becoming more widespread, with about 70% of institutions surveyed reporting that they have one. However, some hubs are primarily physical spaces with limited curricular integration and student engagement. 55% of surveyed institutions reported incubating fewer than five student enterprises. And even incubation does not necessarily mean commercialisation. The report found that only one institution reported student enterprises being formally registered as businesses. Many ventures remained at the prototype stage, became small-scale self-employment activities, or stalled during early development.

The idea-to-market pipeline is strained at every stage. Education does not automatically become the ability to build, building does not immediately convert to venture creation, and venture creation does not automatically become a marketable business.

What would it take to make entrepreneurship education convert?

If Nigeria has already spent nearly two decades embedding entrepreneurship into higher education, the next phase should be about strengthening the systems that move students and researchers from ideas to economic outcomes.

Research incentives need to move beyond publication. Publications should not be the only meaningful outcome of research. The report finds that among the institutions surveyed, much of the research in Nigerian higher education institutions is publication-driven. Universities need to start recognising a broader range of outputs—including patents, prototypes, industry partnerships, licencing agreements and successfully commercialised research—within their research and promotion systems. This would create stronger incentives for research to move beyond academia and into industry.

Nigeria has invested in entrepreneurship centres, innovation hubs and research infrastructure, but the report shows that the harder problem is often what happens after an idea is generated. There needs to be dedicated support for prototype development, including prototype grants, shared facilities, access to technical expertise and industry validation. With this, funding can have greater leverage and support the transition from idea to commercialisation.

If students are expected to create economic opportunities, they need more than a compulsory entrepreneurship course. They need support through the stages that determine whether an idea survives.

The next frontier for the Nigerian higher education system is measuring how effectively students can turn the knowledge they have gathered from studying entrepreneurship into real-world entrepreneurial solutions, and the support that can be given to them to achieve this effectively.

The timing gives that question practical weight. Nigerian universities have been transitioning to the NUC's Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards, a system-wide overhaul of degree programmes that began rolling out in the 2022/2023 academic session. How practical, hands-on support — from prototype funding to industry validation — is built into the new standards will be an early indication of whether conversion is treated as a design goal rather than an afterthought.

About the report

The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Landscape Within Higher Education Institutions in Nigeria report, produced by EyeCity Africa and the National Universities Commission, draws on quantitative survey data from 20 higher education institutions (HEIs) across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones, alongside interviews and focus group discussions with industry, policy and HEI stakeholders. The full report is available here.