There is a quiet assumption beneath most of the criticism aimed at Nigerian universities, which is that they are not trying hard enough. I want to suggest the opposite. The institutions I work with are full of people working extraordinarily hard to prepare young people for the future. The trouble is that they are doing it almost blind, without the one thing any system needs to keep pace with a changing world: timely and accurate information about how the world is changing.
Think about how fast the economy around a university moves. The skills a Lagos fintech needs this year did not exist in the curriculum that trained its current staff. The competencies a Nigerian hospital is desperate to hire are evolving faster than any four-year degree can be revised. Whole categories of work, from data science to digital health to renewable energy to applied artificial intelligence, have appeared in less time than it takes to graduate a single cohort. The economy updates continuously. The curriculum updates, in most institutions, once a decade, through a committee process that was designed for a slower world.
That mismatch is not a scandal. It is a structural feature of how universities and labour markets relate to one another, and it exists everywhere. But it becomes acute in an economy transforming as fast as ours, and it becomes damaging when no one can actually see it happening. You cannot keep pace with something you cannot measure. Around one million young Africans enter the labour market every month, according to the World Bank, and the majority will find that the formal economy has room for only a fraction of them. Some 86 per cent of jobs across sub-Saharan Africa sit in the informal sector. The pressure on the formal pipeline is enormous, and for too long, the distance between what we teach and what employers need has been something we could only guess at.
