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Concept Note and Agenda
Overview of the vision, objectives, and session schedule.
Africa requires “African solutions.” Given the paucity of think tanks, the continent needs a platform for discussing and sharing practical solutions to its challenges. No African country should view a problem as unique, especially if it has already been addressed in another part of the continent. The Nextier Development Festival is part of a series of initiatives to tackle this issue...
Background Paper
Framing analysis and insights to anchor discussions
Despite global poverty decline, Nigeria, home
to one-fifth of Sub-Saharan Africa’s poor, faces persistent widespread poverty affecting 40-63%
of its population. Over 25 years of government anti-poverty interventions have failed due to
poor diagnosis, fragmented programs, weak
execution, volatile oil-dependent financing,
limited subnational capacity, and political
corruption. Moving forward requires addressing structural constraints and governance failures...
Briefing Papers
Briefing Papers
Education and Human Capital Development
The session on Education and Human Capital Development addresses Nigeria’s education crisis, with over 20 million children out of school and low learning outcomes. It explores educational deprivation as a driver of poverty through two panels: one on systemic inequities and another on scaling effective interventions. The session aims to align education policy with poverty alleviation, emphasising inclusive, quality education to enhance human capital, social cohesion, and economic resilience...
Health, Nutrition and Wellbeing
The festival convenes 200 experts to develop intervention design and implementation elements to address Nigeria’s poverty challenges. Participants will use a “Diagnosis-Design-Delivery” framework to examine poverty dimensions, design interventions, and create implementation strategies. This inaugural festival establishes a platform for sharing successful development solutions across Africa...
Living Standards and Basic Infrastructure
The festival convenes 200 experts to develop intervention design and implementation elements to address Nigeria’s poverty challenges. Participants will use a “Diagnosis-Design-Delivery” framework to examine poverty dimensions, design interventions, and create implementation strategies. This inaugural festival establishes a platform for sharing successful development solutions across Africa...
Job Creation and Financial Inclusion
This briefing note analyses Nigeria’s employment crisis, where only 11.8 per cent have formal wage employment, while 51 per cent of working-age adults face work-related multidimensional poverty.
It challenges conventional Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) support strategies, proposing instead to nurture sector-specific “champions” - large, high-growth firms capable of generating quality jobs through supply chain demand. The analysis advocates leveraging Artificial Intelligence for productivity transformation rather than viewing it as an employment threat. Financial inclusion strategies should move beyond basic access to target job-intensive sectors and productive employment. Key focus areas include formalising informal sectors through digital financial services, addressing skills mismatches, and creating wage-paying jobs with social protection that provide pathways out of poverty
Governance, Data, and Policy Implementation
Nigeria’s poverty reduction efforts have delivered mixed results. The successes came from targeted service delivery, partnerships, and measurable outcomes. At the same time, failures stem mostly from fragmented approaches, weak institutions, corruption, short-term political cycles, poor coordination, and one-size-fits all policies that ignore regional and social diversity
Social Protection and Resilience Building
This briefing note examines the critical role of social protection and resilience building in addressing poverty and vulnerability in Nigeria, framed within global theoretical perspectives and international best practices. It highlights social protection as a multifaceted policy tool designed to provide income support, improve access to essential services, and enhance social equity. It focuses on adaptive social protection (ASP) mechanisms that respond dynamically to shocks, including economic crises, climate change, and health emergencies.
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