Deliberate policy contributed to Nigeria’s fintech boom. The open question is whether that playbook can work for agriculture, health, and climate too.
Nigeria’s technology ecosystem has enormous potential to extend beyond fintech, which currently accounts for an estimated 36–60% of the country’s tech sector, depending on whether you count by number of startups or by share of funding. The rise of unicorns such as Flutterwave (≈$3 billion), OPay (≈$2.7 billion), Interswitch ($1 billion), and Moniepoint ($1 billion) illustrates just how successful fintech has become. Between 2019 and the first half of 2023, Nigerian fintechs attracted roughly 49% of all fintech venture capital deployed throughout Africa (Disrupt Africa). In 2020 alone, Nigeria captured $89 million of the continent’s $160 million (56% of the total) in fintech funding. (BusinessDay, 2021).
This success did not occur in a vacuum, but rather emerged due to a combination of enabling policies, market demand, investor confidence and entrepreneurial innovation. The Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2012 National Financial Inclusion Strategy established an explicit target to reduce financial exclusion to 20% by 2020. Subsequent initiatives including the Bank Verification Number (BVN) system, introduction of Payment Service Banks (PSBs), and the Regulatory Sandbox Framework also created a supportive regulatory and digital infrastructure for fintech innovation. More recently, the 2022 currency redesign policy inadvertently accelerated digital payments, contributing to over 230% increase in mobile banking transactions (Business Day, 2023). These policy developments coincided with strong demand for alternative financial services, a young and increasingly digital population, and growing investor confidence, creating conditions that enabled Nigeria’s fintech sector to flourish.
Digital payments and agency banking still dominate the ecosystem, but there are signs that Nigeria’s technology sector is beginning to mature. Founders and investors are increasingly expanding into enterprise software, digital infrastructure, climate technology, mobility, healthcare, agriculture, and the circular economy. Startups such as ColdHubs are reducing post-harvest food losses through solar-powered cold storage, Wecyclers is using technology to improve urban waste collection and recycling, Remedial Health is digitising pharmaceutical distribution, and Chowdeck has rapidly scaled food delivery services nationwide. Climate innovation is also gaining momentum through investments in off-grid solar energy, accelerator programmes, and incubators such as the Nigeria Climate Innovation Centre (NCIC), suggesting that the country’s tech innovation ecosystem is beginning to extend beyond financial services.
The more important question, however, is whether this diversification is occurring quickly enough. Although initiatives such as the Nigeria Startup Act (2022), the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), the Nigeria Climate Innovation Centre (NCIC), and the draft National AI Strategy support innovation more broadly, they have yet to provide the same level of coordinated, sustained support for sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, energy, and environmental management. Nigeria clearly is not short of entrepreneurial talent. The greater challenge, though yet to be rigorously tested, appears to be that similar enabling ecosystems have not been deliberately built in sectors where technological innovation could make substantial contributions to socioeconomic development and help address some of the country’s most persistent challenges.
Whether similar enabling ecosystems can be created for other sectors is an open question. It is however conceivable that sector-specific regulatory sandboxes—similar to those developed by the Central Bank of Nigeria for fintech—could encourage innovation in areas such as food systems, digital health, climate technology, and the circular economy. Likewise, more targeted financing mechanisms, stronger public-private partnerships, and greater investment in research, digital infrastructure, and data systems may prove important for enabling innovation beyond financial services. However, these possibilities are still largely untested in the Nigerian context.
It is difficult to draw firm conclusions at this point, but the more immediate task is to rigorously understand which factors have been most critical to fintech’s success and whether they can be adapted to sectors with equal or greater developmental impact. Answering that question will require a systematic examination of policy, regulation, investment patterns, institutional capacity, and the perspectives of entrepreneurs, investors, regulators, and other stakeholders. That arguably needs to be the focus of the next stage of this discussion.