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How NEPC Is Changing Nigeria’s Export Story
By Kabir Abdulsalam,
When Nonye Ayeni took the helm of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) in October 2023, she inherited an agency navigating global trade disruptions, a weakened naira and Nigeria’s decades-old dependence on crude oil revenue. Nearly three years on, the Council’s numbers tell a different story and, increasingly, so does the way it runs itself.
In 2025, Nigeria’s non-oil exports hit an all-time high of $6.1 billion, an 11.5 percent increase from the $5.46 billion recorded the previous year. Export volumes rose to 8.02 million metric tonnes, up 10 percent year-on-year. Nigerian products now reach 210 export markets across 120 countries, compared with just 93 markets a decade ago.
The Netherlands remains the single largest destination, accounting for more than 17 percent of total export value, while a widening basket of buyers across Asia, the Americas and Africa is gradually reducing Nigeria’s reliance on any single region.
Those figures have earned headlines. What has received less attention is the quieter engineering behind them—a set of internal reforms at NEPC that may help make the growth more sustainable rather than accidental.
NEPC’s public narrative has largely centred on trade figures, but the Council’s own account of the past two years points to a parallel investment in its most important resource: its people.
More than 75 percent of NEPC personnel have undergone professional training since 2023, according to the Council. The initiative is part of a deliberate effort to strengthen the directorate cadre and create clearer advancement pathways for staff across departments, rather than relying primarily on external recruitment to fill capacity gaps.
That internal investment runs alongside a broader mandate to prepare Nigerian exporters themselves.
The revived Zero2Export Training Programme has become an important entry point for new exporters, while the Export Mentorship Programme has paired 60 small and medium-sized enterprises with established, top-performing exporters after training 150 participants. Separately, the Export Skills Acquisition Centre has trained more than 500 young people and women in garment and bag production for export markets—a modest but telling example of NEPC’s attempt to build supply-side capacity, rather than focusing solely on market access.
Perhaps the least visible, yet potentially most consequential, reform has been around data.
For years, Nigeria’s non-oil export figures were sometimes characterised by inconsistencies, with different agencies publishing different totals for the same period. Such discrepancies can undermine confidence in the statistics on which policymakers, investors and businesses rely.
NEPC has pushed to standardise reporting methodologies and align its releases more closely with Central Bank of Nigeria data, a step officials describe as essential to giving the country’s export story credibility beyond press briefings.
The Central Bank’s own monthly tracking provides a more granular picture of the trend. Non-oil export earnings rose to $960 million in April 2026, up from $770 million in March, driven by stronger receipts from cashew nuts and rising fertiliser exports. Urea alone accounted for more than 14 percent of non-oil export earnings that month, trailing only cashew nuts as Nigeria’s leading non-oil export product.
The figures point to a sector that is gradually becoming more diversified rather than being driven by a single commodity cycle.
A less glamorous but structurally important part of the reform agenda is export rejection—the costly problem of Nigerian goods being rejected at foreign borders for failing to meet international standards.
Working with the World Trade Organization and the International Trade Centre under the STDF-845 project, NEPC is helping strengthen standards around sesame and cowpea exports, including the promotion of good agricultural practices aimed at reducing contamination and rejection risks in international markets.
That reputational stake matters more than it might initially appear.
NEPC has separately flagged the considerable gap between Nigeria’s overall trade with the European Union and the country’s non-oil exports to the bloc. Despite $21.87 billion in total trade with the EU, non-oil products account for only about 10 percent of the trade volume, according to the Council. Closing that gap requires more than broad promotional campaigns; it requires targeted market-access interventions and products that can consistently meet international standards.
Reforms of this kind rarely make headlines on their own, but they become visible when an institution is tested.
In early August 2026, online reports circulated alleging an imminent staff strike at NEPC over claims surrounding undisclosed director appointments within the Council. Management and labour responded within days.
The Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria, NEPC’s recognised staff union, publicly stated that it had neither called for nor been consulted about any strike action. The Council’s Head of Corporate Communications, Aliu Sadiq, and the union’s chairman, Comrade Moruf Ogunlana, subsequently confirmed that no industrial action was planned or contemplated following a joint meeting.
The statements came within the same week that the reports surfaced, preventing what could otherwise have developed into a prolonged credibility problem.
For an institution undergoing reform, that speed matters.
A workforce that has confidence in its leadership is more likely to challenge misinformation quickly and publicly rather than allow it to fester in silence. The speed of the joint response, therefore, can be viewed not simply as crisis management, but potentially as one of the dividends of internal engagement and capacity building over the past two years.
It is the kind of institutional stability that rarely generates a headline but can become a precondition for everything that does.
NEPC has signalled that its priorities for 2026 include deeper capacity building, expanded production clusters, further reduction of export rejections, broader SME participation and stronger governance around the solid minerals sector.
The implementation of the Nigeria-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, which is expected to remove tariffs on more than 7,300 Nigerian products, could provide additional opportunities for exporters already positioned to benefit from AfCFTA market access.
The headline number for 2025 was $6.1 billion. The more durable story may be the quieter one: with the last two years, the agency has strengthen its internal capacity, improving the credibility of its data and expanding the capabilities of the businesses it is mandated to support.
If the current trajectory holds, that groundwork not any single trade figure may ultimately prove to be NEPC’s most consequential export.
Kabir writes from Suleja, Niger State. He can be reached via: [email protected]
