Informal Employment in Nigeria Reaches 92%, NBS Says

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has noted that 92.6 percent of employed persons in Nigeria were in informal employment in the first quarter of 2023.

According to NBS, persons in informal employment including agriculture were in the range of 92.6 percent, saying that the percentage in informal employment excluding agriculture is 89.4 percent.

The NBS stated this in its “Nigeria Labour Force Survey” published on its website on Thursday.

The report states that Nigeria’s unemployment rate was 5.3 percent in Q4 2022 and 4.1 per cent in Q1 2023.

The figure indicates a significant drop in the unemployment rate, compared to the 33.3 per cent published by the statistics body as Nigeria’s unemployment rate in 2020.

The drop in unemployment rate is attributed to a rejig of the metric used by the NBS to measure unemployment in the country.