This speech was delivered by Odunayo Eweniyi, Co-founder and COO of Piggyvest, Africa’s leading digital savings and investment platform, at Piggyvest OpenHouse 2026, the company’s town hall event held at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and the Creative Arts, Lagos.
1. A Tale of Two Nigerias
Good afternoon. Thank you for coming, and thank you for being here for ten years. You already know that one of my favourite things to do is to talk to you, our users. To talk with you.
So, today, I want to talk about the country, the way we see it from inside Piggyvest, because almost ten million of you have shown us what money in Nigeria actually looks like.
So, this is a state of the nation. Not the one on the news. The one at your dining table. The one that’s very close to home. The one that’s our reality.
Here is the news version.
• Inflation is 15%. At the end of 2024, it was almost 35%.
• The naira is at a two-year high.
• Our foreign reserves are the strongest they have been in 18 years.
• The Nigerian stock market is the best-performing in the world this year, in dollars.
• JP Morgan just put our bonds back in one of its emerging-market indexes, for the first time in 11 years.
• The CBN cut its policy rate from 26.5% to 23% on September 22nd, its biggest cut in years
In the headlines, you would think Nigeria is having a very good year. They’re not wrong. It is.
But here is the version we hear from you. Today, a lot of Nigerians live below the national poverty line – 63%. That is about 140 million people. That number has gone up every single year since 2023.
In The Piggyvest Savings Report 2023, eight in ten people saved something. Last year, as we went out and spoke to nearly 30,000 Nigerians across the country, it was under five in ten. Six in ten of us have no emergency fund at all. And when we asked people how they feel about money, only 6% said “secure.”
So which Nigeria is real? Both of them. That is the whole problem.
The economy has stabilised on paper, and the IMF said exactly that in June, with a line I keep coming back to: “conditions for many Nigerians remain difficult.”
The distance between those two sentences is what I want to talk about today.
2. The numbers you already know
You do not need me to explain inflation. You have been to the market.
Let me start with jollof rice. A pot of jollof rice for a family costs 624% more than it did ten years ago. Not 62%. Six hundred and twenty-four. The minimum wage is ₦70,000. One family pot of jollof rice is 42% of that. Nearly half a month’s wage, one Sunday afternoon.
Here is why the headline number does not match your receipt. Overall inflation is 15%. Food inflation is almost 20%, and it is still rising month on month. In July alone, food prices went up 5.6%. And food is where ₦6 out of every ₦10 a Nigerian household spends goes. That is the highest share of any country the US Department of Agriculture tracks. In America, less than 10% of household spending goes to food bought for consumption at home. Here, it can be nearly 60%. So when the number that is falling is the one you barely spend on, and the number that is rising is the one you spend most on, you do not feel richer.
Why? Because YOU are being measured by the wrong number.
Now, income. 58% of Nigerian adults earn under ₦100,000 a month, or earn nothing at all. Among Gen Z, it is 77%. The minimum wage is ₦70,000, which is $53 today. In 2023, the old ₦30,000 wage was worth $65. So the naira amount more than doubled, and the dollar value went down.
That is the trick of the last three years, in one line from our own report: people are earning more and affording less.
And this is where saving went. In 2023, one in five Nigerians did not save at all. In 2024, it was four in ten. In our latest report, for 2025, it is more than half. When we asked the people who stopped, six in ten said one thing: I don’t earn enough. Only two in ten said they didn’t care. People did not lose the habit. They lost the margin.
3. Included, but not protected
Here is a number that should be good news. Nearly three in four Nigerian adults now use a bank, a wallet or another formal financial service. Nigeria hit its financial inclusion target. Ten years ago, when we started, that was the whole conversation. Get people an account. We did it.
But three in four Nigerian adults are still not financially healthy. Even among Nigerians with a bank account, only one in ten could raise ₦156,000 (10% of Nigeria’s GNI per capita) in a week without difficulty. One in four could not raise emergency money at all, from anyone.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, that number is one in eight. We are twice as exposed as our neighbours.
So access has gone up. But the cushion went down. Getting everyone an account turned out to be the easy part.
And we saw both Nigerias in one week this month. The Dangote IPO opened, and investing apps crashed because so many people wanted a ₦5,250 ticket. The week before, a Ponzi scheme collapsed, and people stormed its offices in Yola and in Kabba.
Same country, same month, same hunger to make money grow. One group had somewhere safe to put it. The other did not.
4. Not a savings problem, a systems problem
I said this in our 2025 Savings Report, and I will say it again, louder: Nigerians do not have a savings problem. We have a systems problem.
Let’s look at the data. A lot of the people who stopped did not stop because they lost interest. They stopped because the money ran out before the month did. About half of income earners start every month not sure their income will cover the basics. You cannot budget your way out of not having enough.
But you can budget your way through it.
Here is the other thing we found. We asked people what their most stressful money decision was this year. Only 6% said a big purchase, like a phone or a new fridge. More than half said one of four things: rent, family, business, or an emergency. Nobody in this room is stressed because they bought too much.
We all just need systems that catch us.
And that is what we have spent ten years building, and I want to say plainly what it has done, because we do not say it nearly enough.
Safelock exists because we knew you would need a lock you cannot break at 2 am, and this year alone, over 1 million of you used it to hold money you would otherwise have spent.
Flex Dollar exists because you should not need a cousin in Toronto to hold value.
Target Savings exists because rent comes on a date, not on a feeling. When the money runs out before the month does, the thing that meant you still had something is not willpower. It is that you had put it somewhere first.
That is the Piggyvest system. And it works.
It has paid out over ₦1.3 trillion to users so far this year, and every naira of it was yours.
There are so many reasons the country has gotten harder for all of us. But for almost ten million people, we want to continue to be part of the reason it did not get harder than it had to.
5. Family is the safety net…or is it?
Let me tell you what the Nigerian welfare state actually looks like. More than half of Nigerian earners support extended family. For three years running, the number one source of loans in this country has not been a bank or an app. It has been friends and family.
But today, the share of earners paying black tax has fallen from over 80% to about two-thirds. Are families getting freer, or are they getting poorer? Are fewer people being asked, or do fewer people have anything left to give?
I think it is some of both.
And I think a company like ours has to build for both answers.
This is where I am proudest of what we do. For a lot of you, Piggyvest is the “ajo” that cannot run away with the money.
It is the cooperative that pays interest instead of asking for a guarantor. It is the emergency fund you built so that the next time something happens, the first call is not to your mother.
Every person who can handle their own emergency is one less phone call across a family, and one more family that is a little freer. That is not a small thing.
6. Staying means something
Now I want to turn a corner, because I did not come here to depress you.
56% of Nigerians have thought about leaving the country. In 2017 it was 36%. But the doors are closing. Visa refusals are getting more common. More of us than ever want to go, but fewer of us than ever can.
You would expect that to break people. But it has not. Nigerians are the most optimistic people in the world about their children’s future.
65% of us believe the next generation will be better off. Out of 28 countries surveyed, that is the highest. The world average is 32%. We are twice as hopeful as the rest of the entire planet. And I love that.
Because that hope is going somewhere. 6 in 10 young Nigerians say they would rather start a business than take a job. And here is the number I am proudest of in this year’s report.
In 2023, japa was the number one savings goal for more than half of Gen Z. By 2024, that had halved. This year it dropped out of the top goals completely.
We can think about it the other way, or we can look at it like this: the people in this room started saving to stay. Not because staying got easier.
But because you decided to build here anyway. That is just the most Nigerian thing.
7. The 6%
I want to end with the 6%. The Nigerians who told us they feel secure and content about money.
They are not the richest people in the survey, and they are definitely not all earning ₦450,000 a month. What more than half of them have in common is one habit: they save a fixed amount, every month, no matter what.
That is the strongest single predictor of feeling stable we have ever found; it is not the size of the amount, it is the fixedness of it.
So this is the hope. The hope is not that the economy will fix itself. Maybe it will even. But it will take time to get to your dining table.
The hope is smaller and closer than that. It is that a person on ₦100,000 a month, in this country, this year, can start to find some financial security.
By putting ₦5,000 somewhere every month that they cannot touch, and having somewhere for the rest to sit and grow, and having a cushion of their own when the emergency comes.
I’m not going to pretend like this is easy. In fact, I know it is not. But I know this works, because I’ve watched it work. Many of the 6% are in this room. And if you saved anything on Piggyvest this year, anything at all, you are already ahead of half the country.
This is what Piggyvest is for, in a year like this one. Three things. We tell you the honest number every year, even when it is bad, which is why we sit down face to face with almost 30,000 Nigerians for the Piggyvest Savings Report.
We build for the life you actually have: rent, family, business, emergencies, and not the life the budgeting apps imagine.
And we make it possible to build here.
We have done that for ten years. We will do it for the next ten.
Thank you.
