World Bank keeps Nigeria in lower-middle income tier for 2027 as Seychelles remains in high-income class
The World Bank has again placed Nigeria in its lower-middle income category for the 2027 fiscal year, leaving Africa’s most populous nation and biggest economy on the same rung as regional peers such as Ghana, Kenya and Senegal and two tiers below the continent’s wealthiest economies.
The classification, which groups countries by gross national income (GNI) per capita, places Nigeria among economies earning between $1,176 and $4,635 per person. That is comfortably above the low-income floor of $1,175, but well short of the upper-middle band ($4,636 to $14,375) and far below the $14,375 threshold for high-income status.
Measured against the rest of the continent, Nigeria sits in a crowded middle. It shares the lower-middle tier with Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Angola, Zambia and others, while a smaller group of African economies, including South Africa, Botswana, Mauritius, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, occupies the upper-middle bracket.
Only one African country, Seychelles, is classified as high income.
A large bloc of the continent’s economies, including Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger and Mali, remains in the low-income group beneath Nigeria.
The gap between Nigeria’s size and its per-capita ranking underlines a familiar tension: while the country is one of Africa’s largest economies by total output, its income spread across a population of more than 200 million keeps average GNI per head firmly in the middle of the pack.
The figures are calculated with the World Bank’s Atlas method, which averages exchange rates over three years to iron out currency volatility and make cross-country comparisons more reliable. Nigeria was also listed as a “blend” country, meaning it can draw financing from both the International Development Association, the arm that lends to poorer nations on soft terms, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
This year’s review reshuffled a few African economies. Cabo Verde climbed into the upper-middle income tier, and Togo moved up from low to lower-middle income, while Namibia slipped down from upper-middle to lower-middle status.
Nigeria itself has not moved. It has been classified as lower-middle-income since 2010, when it graduated from the low-income group, and has remained there since. The federal government has argued that its wave of fiscal, monetary and foreign exchange reforms aimed at lifting productivity, diversifying exports and stabilising the economy is designed to push the country up a tier eventually. On current numbers, that climb remains some distance away.
