Nigeria cannot secure its future without early childhood investment, By Hope Lekwa & Omei Bongos

Nigeria cannot secure its future without early childhood investment, By Hope Lekwa & Omei Bongos

Nigeria is currently spending less than ₦500 daily (less than one dollar) per child on everything that shapes their survival, growth, learning, and protection. This translates to about $7 dollars a month and less than the cost of a single day’s nutritional meal for a Nigerian household.

Nigeria’s early childhood development spending is not just low. It falls below the international poverty threshold when translated into developmental terms of cost per child, and far beneath what is required to secure basic early childhood outcomes in a country of over 200 million people. It shows the disconnect between economic ambition and human capital investment in a country that aims to leverage its demographic advantage. And this represents a current crisis seen in learning outcomes, health and nutrition, but also a future risk in terms of workforce readiness and productivity.

The first five years of life represent a critical developmental window and the most economically consequential in human development. It is the period during which the brain forms up to one million new connections per second, establishing the foundations for language, cognition, emotional regulation, and learning ability. What happens at this stage goes on to determine their productivity later in life.

Evidence shows that high-quality early childhood interventions yield returns of $7 to $13 for every $1 invested. In low-income countries, studies show that children who receive adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation earn between 25 per cent and 43 per cent more as adults. These are macroeconomic channels affecting labour productivity, tax capacity, and long-run GDP growth.

The problem is not spending Nigeria’s allocations alone to child-related sectors, increased from ₦1.14 trillion in 2023 to ₦2.06 trillion in 2025, suggesting rising fiscal attention. But these resources are dispersed across health, education, nutrition, and social protection systems without a unified early childhood development framework.

Yet, Nigeria continues to underinvest in early childhood, when returns to investment are highest. According to the World Bank’s The Case for Early Childhood Development report, Nigeria’s early childhood system shows significant developmental deficits. Only 24.1 per cent of children aged four to six can write a simple word beyond their name, while just 39 per cent can correctly identify the larger of two single-digit numbers. Executive functioning is also weak, with only 20.4 per cent demonstrating basic planning skills. Taken together, the data points to a structural imbalance in early development outcomes, in which foundational cognitive skills represent the binding constraint on early human capital formation.

These effects are persistent and largely irreversible after the early childhood windows close. From a growth accounting perspective, early childhood underinvestment reduces future output: Weak foundational skills reduce workforce efficiency and limit transition into higher-productivity sectors and lower tax capacity over time. It also shifts scarce fiscal resources from preventive early investment to expensive remediation in education, health, and social protection systems. The problem is not spending Nigeria’s allocations alone to child-related sectors, increased from ₦1.14 trillion in 2023 to ₦2.06 trillion in 2025, suggesting rising fiscal attention. But these resources are dispersed across health, education, nutrition, and social protection systems without a unified early childhood development framework.

This fragmentation produces three structural weaknesses and points of failure in: Measurement, coordination, and accountability. This makes it impossible to track how much early childhood-specific services causes interventions in nutrition, health, and early learning to operate in silos, instead of a coherent developmental package, and ultimately, makes it difficult to link outcomes to spending decisions.

Improving early childhood development outcomes in Nigeria requires structural reform, not just more funding. ECD should be treated as core economic infrastructure, essential to long-term productivity, rather than as social welfare. Nigeria needs a ring-fenced financing framework that unifies spending across health, nutrition, and early learning under one accountable system…

We Must Move from Spending Alone To System Design

Improving early childhood development outcomes in Nigeria requires structural reform, not just more funding. ECD should be treated as core economic infrastructure, essential to long-term productivity, rather than as social welfare. Nigeria needs a ring-fenced financing framework that unifies spending across health, nutrition, and early learning under one accountable system, with end-to-end tracking that links federal allocations to service delivery and child-level results.

Financing must shift to results-based mechanisms, in which funds are tied to measurable improvements in early learning, nutrition, and developmental outcomes, ensuring every investment drives tangible progress in children’s growth and future productivity. Nigeria’s spending of less than ₦500 per child per day investment is not a minor budget line. It captures a deeper contradiction between long-term growth ambition and underinvestment in the foundation of that growth. The consequence is not immediate collapse, but sustained underperformance: lower productivity, weaker human capital formation, and a growing gap between demographic scale and economic output. If this persists, Nigeria will continue to pay the price of underinvestment long after the opportunity for early correction has passed.

Hope Lekwa is a research analyst at Gatefield, while Omei Bongos-Ikwue leads the Health and Longevity and Resilient Futures Domain at Gatefield.