The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has reported that Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which measures the average standard of living of a country’s citizens, declined to $835.49 in 2025 from $877.07 in 2024, representing a 4.74% drop.
GDP is the most commonly used measure of a country’s overall economic activity and represents the total value at current prices of final goods and services produced within a country during a specified time. The GDP per capital is the total value of the economic activity divided by the average population for the same year.
Data published on the IMF’s website on Thursday indicated that Nigeria’s GDP per capital had been sustaining a downtrend since 2014, when the GDP per capita stood at $3,220.
Despite the dipping trend of the nation’s GDP per capital, the IMF, however, projected a rise in 2026 and 2027, with the GDP per capita expected to cross the $1,000 mark in 2028 at $1,040.
The latest data by the multilateral finance institution also showed that Nigeria and most countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remained within the $500 to $2,500 GDP per capita band, with some below $500.
Meanwhile, the IMF had earlier projected that Nigeria’s real GDP growth this year would be 3.2% while analysts estimated that the inflation rate would drop to 25%.
However, the IMF’s GDP growth projection for Nigeria is lower than the 5.5% projected by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) in its recently launched its 2025 Macroeconomic Outlook Report with the theme ‘Stabilisation in Transition: Rethinking Reform Strategies for 2025 and Beyond.’
The IMF’s data is coming ahead of the release of the nation’s GDP rebased data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which will incorporate new sectors of the economy into the new report now being awaited.
The Bureau had hinted that the rebased GDP would contain data in digital economy activities, pension funds, the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Nigerian Social Insurance Trust Fund, the activities of modular refineries, domestic households as employers of labour, and quarrying and other mining activities, among others.
