Nigeria's Population Explosion, From 16 Million to a Projected Global Top Three

Nigeria’s population has grown roughly fourteenfold in a little over a century. The territory’s 1911 census, taken under British colonial administration, recorded about 16 million people; by 2024, estimates put the country’s population at roughly 232 million, making it the world’s sixth or seventh most populous nation and, by a wide margin, Africa’s most populous.

That growth shows no sign of leveling off in the near term. Multiple demographic projections, including UN-derived estimates, put Nigeria’s population at somewhere between 400 and 450 million by 2050, a range that would make it the world’s third most populous country by that point, behind only India and China. The country’s population nearly tripled between 1982 and the early 2020s, a pace driven by a fertility rate that has remained well above the global average even as many other large developing economies have seen birth rates fall more sharply.

Longer-range projections, out to the year 2100, have proven considerably less stable. A widely cited set of estimates built from the UN’s World Population Prospects data in the late 2010s, and reported at the time by outlets including the World Economic Forum, projected Nigeria would overtake China to become the world’s second most populous country by 2100, trailing only India. That specific “second only to India” framing traced to a particular vintage of UN projections built on the fertility-decline assumptions available at the time. The UN’s 2024 revision of those same long-range projections lowered Nigeria’s estimated 2100 population substantially, to roughly 541 million, reflecting updated assumptions about how quickly Nigerian fertility rates are expected to fall over the coming decades. The reversal illustrates how sensitive century-long population forecasts are to small changes in near-term fertility assumptions, a caveat that applies to any single-figure demographic claim projected that far into the future.

Nigeria’s medium-term trajectory is more settled: barring a sharp and sustained fertility decline, most current projections agree the country will pass the United States in population sometime before 2050, cementing its position as one of the handful of countries whose demographic weight will shape global population trends for the rest of the century, even if the exact scale of that shift a lifetime from now remains genuinely uncertain.