Afreximbank Group Chief Economist Yemi Kale has warned that fragmented data is undermining Nigeria’s productivity, job creation and the efficiency of its labour market.

Kale, a former Statistician General of the National Bureau of Statistics, spoke via video link at the National Skills and Industry Alignment Roundtable in Abuja, which examined the role of data in job creation. He said Nigeria’s youthful population, with 70 per cent under 30, was both an opportunity and a challenge, demanding quality education, absorptive capacity and strong institutions.

He argued that countries which achieved lasting economic transformation did so not because of natural resources but because they aligned their human capital systems with the changing needs of their economies, adding that the strength of today’s most competitive economies lay as much in the quality of their information systems as in the quality of their labour.

Kale said employers across Nigeria were hunting for skills while millions of citizens searched for opportunities, and training institutions, policymakers and investors were all searching too, but doing so separately rather than together. The information that should connect them, he said, remained scattered across different platforms and databases, leaving opportunities invisible and skills undervalued.

Rimam Nuhu, Special Adviser to the Vice President on Workforce Development, said the National Council on Skills aimed to produce evidence-based policy and use a new database to pinpoint skills gaps and improve workforce planning, while Strategic Partnership Lead Afolabi Imokhuede said the goal was to strengthen existing systems and turn siloed data into intelligence that could forecast labour market demand.