The Federal Government has begun a nationwide registration of young Nigerians under a new National Youth Data Bank, and is urging everyone aged 15 to 35 to sign up so the state can map their skills, locations and needs.
The Minister of Youth Development, Ayodele Olawande, launched the project on Tuesday, 30 September 2026, in Abuja, at an event themed “Building a Stronger Future for the Nigerian Youth through Data, Opportunity and Inclusion”. He said the platform would hold information on demographics, education, skills, employment, entrepreneurship, civic participation and health.
According to the minister, the aim is to answer basic questions the government says it cannot currently answer with confidence. He framed these as who the country’s young people are, where they are, what they can do and what opportunities they need.
Olawande said the registration would cover both the formal and informal sectors, reaching youths in agriculture, sport, and the creative and technology industries. He stressed that the exercise was a continuous government programme and not tied to any electoral purpose.
The technical partner handling the project, POGMA Nigeria Limited, said enrolment had already started. Its managing director, Oluyinka Akerele, said cluster registration points had been set up in secondary schools, polytechnics, universities and colleges of education, and that enumerators would be deployed across the 774 local government areas to reach those in informal work and rural communities.
Akerele said the 15 to 35 age band follows the definition in the National Youth Policy. He added that the database would be updated in the same way the electoral register is, capturing new entrants as they turn 15.
The scale of the challenge the government says it is responding to is significant, though the precise numbers remain contested. Nigeria has no fresh national census, with population figures still commonly drawn from the 2006 count of about 140 million and later estimates putting the total above 200 million. The World Bank has described Nigeria as having one of the youngest populations in the world, with a large share under the age of 25.
The labour picture for that group is where official and independent figures diverge sharply, and readers should treat the two sets with care. Under the methodology the National Bureau of Statistics adopted after rebasing its labour statistics in 2023, youth unemployment for those aged 15 to 34 stood at 6.5 per cent in the second quarter of 2024, down from 8.4 per cent in the first quarter. That revised method counts anyone who worked for at least one hour in a reference week as employed, which is why the headline rate appears low.
Other assessments paint a far harsher scene. The State of the Nigerian Youth Report 2025, presented in Abuja last year during a youth dialogue convened by the House of Representatives Committee on Youth, put the figure much higher, stating that more than half of the country’s young population were without jobs. The gap between that reading and the bureau’s rate reflects differences in definition rather than a simple contradiction, and it is part of the information problem the new register is being sold as a fix for.
The Data Bank also arrives against a fragmented backdrop of existing youth schemes. The Nigeria Youth Investment Fund, announced in 2024 with a reported N110 billion capital allocation through the Bank of Industry, along with the student loan scheme and various skills programmes, have run without a single, verified national database of beneficiaries. Olawande said the new platform was intended to end that fragmentation by giving ministries, agencies, states, schools and development partners a shared source of youth information.
He acknowledged the sensitivity of gathering personal data at that scale. The minister said accuracy, security, privacy and responsible management would be central to the project, adding that the goal was to use information to improve young people’s lives rather than to collect it for its own sake. The Tribune reported that identity verification and data validation processes would be built into the system to improve reliability.
The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Youth Development, Adeyemi Adaramodu, who was represented at the launch, welcomed the initiative as a step towards more responsive and evidence based youth policy. He commended the ministry and its partners for developing the platform.
What is confirmed at this stage is the launch, the age bracket, the registration channels and the government’s stated ambition. What remains to be seen is participation. The success of the register will depend on how many young Nigerians in the informal sector and hard to reach areas actually enrol, how the data is protected, and whether the information translates into the jobs, skills and opportunities the government has promised. On present evidence, none of those outcomes can yet be assumed.