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backA couple of months ago, we set out to work on a second, more ambitious version of the informal economy report. There’s a lot of work that went into it, and I’ll give you the deets later, but for now, here’s a quick guide to what’s new about the 2025 informal economy report.
We launched an AI chatbot with deeper insights
Last year, we did a lot of the heavy lifting and interpretation, working on the insights and interpreting them with available context. This year, we've gone a step further.
We’ve built M, an AI chatbot that gives you, policymakers, regulators, investors and everyone who’s interested in the informal economy direct access to our data. Through M, our informal report AI chatbot, you get to ask questions and uncover insights that we may not have included in the main report. This way, whatever your use case is, you can get all the information you need.
Check it out here: informalreport.moniepoint.com
Sense check: how’s the informal economy doing?
We’ve also expanded the scope of our research, including questions about how informal businesses are doing, especially in the context of Nigeria’s economic changes over the past year. One key insight is that the cost of doing business has increased for 79% of informal businesses in the past year. Another is that while 65% of them have seen an increase in revenue over the past year, only 47% of them saw a corresponding increase in profits. We hope that these questions serve as a basis for continuing to assess how policies and economic decisions affect everyday informal businesses.
Meet the everyday people of the informal economy
Alongside the report, we’ve also released a documentary series about the informal economy. This series spotlights the stories of people in Nigeria’s informal economy, what they’re doing to survive and what their businesses mean to them. The first story is about Yiteovie, a woman who taught herself to fish in order to feed her family. Beyond the data, numbers, and spreadsheets, we’ve spoken to the real people out there who make up Nigeria’s informal economy, and we hope that their stories help you understand their impact much better.
Why does any of this matter?
The informal economy in Nigeria remains the greatest contributor to employment, both as a direct source of employment for the over 39 million businesses that are part of it, and for their employees (40% of informal businesses employ labour). This is why we’re so interested (read obsessed) with this at Moniepoint.
We believe that a collective effort to solve the problems that informal businesses face is the fastest way to impact millions of people across Nigeria, and access to data is a good first step. We hope you find this as exciting and useful as we did!
Visit informalreport.moniepoint.com to dive in.
