Adédèjì Ọlọ́wẹ̀

Nigeria’s 200 million-strong population is often the ultimate proof that the giant of Africa has a large market for just about anything. The belief is that as long as you make anything, you can sell it here.

But our economic realities have helped us adjust those mythic expectations and what we now talk a lot about is Nigeria’s total addressable market (TAM). TAM has become a contentious term, mainly because there’s not much data to give you a clear picture of the Nigerian market.

Instead, you have pieces of data to patch together to make some assumptions. So right off the bat, we know that in 2020, the size of Nigeria’s working population is 62.2 million and that we have around 99 million unique mobile subscribers as well.   

It paints a picture of a vast market, but this population has limitations such as record unemployment and a high poverty rate. Agriculture, one of the sectors that employ many people, is essentially subsistence farming at an almost primordial level.

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