Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan, Enugu, and Port Harcourt emerged as Nigeria’s top five cities in the 2025 Global Startup Ecosystem Index by StartupBlink, a leading global startup research platform.
They were followed by Ilorin, Kano, Kaduna, Nguru, and Benin City, rounding out the country’s top 10. The index assessed over 1,450 cities across more than 110 countries.
“Nigeria has six cities ranked in the global top 1,000, with the majority experiencing a decline in rank,” the report said. Despite these dips, Nigeria remains West Africa’s dominant startup hub, consistently placing six cities in the region’s top ten since 2021.
Nationally, however, Nigeria dropped two spots, from 64th in 2024 to 66th in 2025, slipping to fourth place among African countries on the index. It also recorded the lowest ecosystem growth (below 6 percent) among the continent’s top seven startup nations.
Still, Nigeria leads the continent in the number of unicorn startups, with companies like Flutterwave and OPay expanding aggressively across Africa.
The country continues to lean heavily on Lagos, whose ecosystem is 11.8 times larger than Abuja’s, the next most prominent city. “With an internal market of more than 200 million people (projected to reach 400 million by 2050), Nigeria and its capital, Lagos, have become a leading startup hub in Africa,” the report added.
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