A Country of Sharp Contrasts

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🌍 A Country of Sharp Contrasts

In Lagos, a city of 15 million people, gleaming glass towers rise above the financial district while a few kilometres away, residents of Makoko — a floating slum built on stilts above a lagoon — paddle canoes to work and lack running water. Nigeria is Africa's largest economy, home to Nollywood (the world's second biggest film industry), and a country that pumps over 2 million barrels of oil a day. Yet 62% of its people live on less than $1.90 a day. Welcome to the world's most dramatic development story: a country that is simultaneously one of the fastest-growing economies on earth and one of the most unequal.

This is exactly why Nigeria is a GCSE Geography case study for a "Newly Emerging Economy" (NEE). It shows everything in one place: the power of oil, the role of TNCs, the growth of manufacturing and services, and the deep challenges of inequality and environmental damage.

Your exam board lets your school choose the country for this case study. Nigeria is one valid choice and is the one we use here. If your school teaches a different country, such as Ethiopia or India, use the same headings (causes, effects, responses) to organise your own case study notes.

Nigeria in three parts. On the left an oil site with a gas flare, in the middle the Lagos skyline and container port, and on the right a rural village with a school and a hand pump.

Figure 1: Nigeria, a newly emerging economy: oil, the big port city of Lagos and rural villages.

Nigeria's HDI was 0.560 in 2023 (UNDP Human Development Report 2025).

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