For decades, progress has been measured mainly through economic indicators. GDP growth, investment levels, employment figures, government revenues, and productivity statistics have become the dominant way we assess how a nation is doing. These numbers matter. They help us understand economic activity and track how things change over time.
But they don't tell the whole story.
A community can experience rising economic activity while social trust quietly declines. A region can attract investment while the environment around it deteriorates. Growth can happen even as cultural knowledge disappears, social bonds weaken, or communities become less able to withstand the next shock. None of that shows up in the statistics right away, but it shapes everything about a country's long term prosperity.
What is the value of an economy if the community holding it together is broken?
The Nigerian Prosperity Index was built to help answer that question.
Prosperity is more than economic output
Growth is still essential. People need jobs, businesses need room to expand, and governments need resources to provide public goods. But economies don't exist on their own. They're shaped by relationships, institutions, knowledge, culture, and the natural environment around them. When those foundations are strong, prosperity holds up. When they weaken, economic gains become fragile and hard to sustain.
This isn't a new idea globally. The United Nations Development Programme's Human Development framework argues that development should be judged by people's capabilities, opportunities, and wellbeing, not output alone. The OECD has pointed to trust and social capital as key drivers of both economic performance and quality of life. Taken together, the message is clear: lasting prosperity depends not just on what an economy produces, but on how strong the social, cultural, environmental, and institutional ground beneath it really is.
The Nigerian Prosperity Index takes those insights and grounds them in the values, priorities, and lived realities of Nigerian communities. Instead of starting with assumptions about what prosperity should look like, it starts by asking communities what actually allows them to thrive, adapt, and build secure futures. Prosperity is felt locally long before it's measured nationally, and communities carry forms of knowledge that conventional metrics tend to miss. The Index tries to combine that community knowledge with rigorous research, aiming for something that is both academically credible and genuinely reflective of Nigerian life.
Through its ongoing research and community engagement, six interconnected dimensions have emerged as central to understanding prosperity in Nigeria.
Six dimensions of prosperity
Communal Wealth and Shared Prosperity
Prosperity is strongest when its benefits are broadly shared, and when communities have networks of support that help people navigate uncertainty. Across Nigeria, families, cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, faith communities, and informal support systems provide a kind of security and opportunity that no income statistic can fully capture.
Ecological Balance and Environmental Health
Every economy depends on the natural systems that sustain it. Productive land, clean water, healthy ecosystems, and environmental resilience support agriculture, livelihoods, public health, and future economic activity. Protecting the environment isn't separate from prosperity. It's one of the conditions that makes prosperity possible in the first place.
Knowledge Continuity and Skills Transmission
Every generation inherits capabilities from the one before it: formal education, vocational skills, technical expertise, cultural traditions, indigenous knowledge. A society is far better positioned to innovate, adapt, and create opportunity when it can preserve and pass down what it knows.
Social Cohesion and Community Bonds
Trust, cooperation, and connectedness are often overlooked as forms of wealth, yet they shape how communities actually function. Places with strong relationships tend to be better at solving problems, supporting enterprise, managing conflict, and responding to challenges when they come.
Disaster Resilience and Traditional Risk Capacity
Prosperity shouldn't be measured only by what a society produces during good times. It should also be measured by its ability to withstand disruption and recover from adversity. The capacity to adapt and bounce back is, in itself, a form of prosperity.
Cultural Dignity and Self-Determination
Prosperity requires more than material wellbeing. It requires agency, belonging, and the freedom to shape one's own future. Communities need to preserve their identities, maintain cultural continuity, and take part meaningfully in the decisions that affect their lives.
What this adds up to
Taken together, these six dimensions give us a broader understanding of prosperity, and they reveal just how closely economic success is tied to social, cultural, environmental, and institutional wellbeing. They aren't alternatives to economic growth. They're among the foundations that make growth sustainable and meaningful in the first place.
Prosperity, then, isn't simply the wealth a society produces. It's the capacity of people, communities, institutions, and ecosystems to generate, sustain, and share wellbeing across generations.
The Nigerian Prosperity Index is currently in its research and community engagement phase. What's presented here is the conceptual foundation, and it will keep being refined through consultation, field research, and methodological development. As the programme grows, its findings, publications, methodologies, and opportunities for participation will be made publicly available.
What we choose to measure shapes what we choose to prioritize. If we only measure economic output, we risk missing the conditions that let prosperity actually last. By measuring the strength of communities, the health of ecosystems, the continuity of knowledge, resilience, and cultural dignity alongside economic performance, the Nigerian Prosperity Index is trying to build a fuller picture of national progress. Its purpose is simple: to measure what has always mattered.
Intellectual influences
The Nigerian Prosperity Index is an independent framework built through its own research and community engagement, but it draws on a much wider body of work on human development, social capital, resilience, environmental sustainability, and wellbeing.
- 01The UNDP's Human Development framework
- 02Amartya Sen's capabilities approach
- 03OECD research on trust and social capital
- 04The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi
- 05Broader research on sustainable development undertaken by institutions like the World Bank
None of these works defined the Index or its six dimensions. They fed into a growing international conversation about the limits of measuring progress through economic output alone, and the need for a broader way of understanding human wellbeing and long term prosperity.
Where things stand
The six dimensions above are emerging from that process and will keep being refined through consultation, field research, and methodological development. Detailed methodology papers, research findings, and future versions of the framework will be published as the programme moves forward.