Thursday 09 April, 2026

The economy grew. The World Bank had to explain what that means for a child in Kano.

Nigeria's economy grew 4% in 2025. The same rate as 2024. The World Bank presented this on Tuesday as progress. Cautious, real, worth building on.

Then Fiseha Haile, the World Bank's lead economist for Nigeria, listed what the growth didn't reach. 110 children per 1,000 die before the age of five. About 40% are stunted. More than half aren't developmentally on track when they start school.

Those numbers don't live inside the GDP figure. They live beside it.

The machinery

Early childhood stunting in Nigeria is not evenly distributed. In some southern states, the rate is below 15%. In parts of the north, it's above 60%. That gap doesn't reflect different climates or different genes. It reflects different access. To ante-natal care, to nutrition, to clean water, to functional health facilities close enough to reach before something goes wrong.

The World Bank's argument, laid out in this week's Nigeria Development Update, is that this gap will determine Nigeria's economic ceiling. Children who are stunted at two don't catch up. Children who aren't school-ready at five enter a system already behind the pace it needs them to meet. The economy that grows 4% a year is producing a workforce that was shaped in conditions the growth couldn't fix, because the growth didn't go there.

The report was direct. Investments during the first 2,000 days of a child's life, from pregnancy to age five, generate returns of between 7 and 13% annually. Not through charity. Through higher productivity, better health outcomes, lower crime costs, stronger social cohesion. This is the most cost-effective investment Nigeria can make. It's also the one that consistently doesn't get made at scale.

The complication

The Iran war drove fuel prices up more than 50%. That feeds transport costs, food costs, every household budget. Inflation that was falling, from 26% to 15% between early 2025 and February 2026, now faces new upward pressure. The households most affected by that pressure are the same households where children are most likely to be stunted.

The World Bank told Nigeria explicitly to use the oil windfall to support vulnerable households through targeted transfers, not blanket subsidies. By the time the report was presented, the ceasefire had already begun deflating that windfall. The window to act on the advice is the same window that's closing.

The reader stake

If you have children under five in Nigeria, especially in the north, the conditions the World Bank is describing are the conditions your child is developing in. Not abstractly. Specifically. The gap between what the health system can offer your child in the first five years and what it would need to offer to guarantee developmental readiness is the gap the GDP number walks past.

4% growth sounds like a country moving. A child who doesn't reach their developmental milestones before school is a country whose future is moving slower than its present.