Navigating Nigeria: Insider Tips for Expats

The first quarter of 2026 delivered a series of project awards that, taken together, reveal the structure of Nigeria's distributed energy procurement pipeline with unusual clarity. The Rural Electrification Agency, operating through the World Bank-supported Utility Enabled Projects programme, announced successful bidders for interconnected mini-grid deployments. A N9 billion disbursement pushed solar mini-grids into four states that have not historically been centres of renewable energy deployment. And in Kano, a 1 MWp rooftop solar and 2.15 MWh battery system at a rice mill demonstrated what project execution looks like when developers, technology providers, and local EPC contractors coordinate effectively. For equipment manufacturers, EPC contractors, and project developers tracking where procurement budgets are being allocated in Nigeria's distributed energy sector, the Q1 2026 project announcements provide a map of who is buying, what they are buying, and how the supply ch...

Two weeks ago, a man named Ibrahim sent me a LinkedIn request. His profile said he ran a small solar installation business in Kano, northern Nigeria. I almost ignored it. My inbox is full of pitches I don’t remember signing up for. But his note was different. It was short and blunt. “I keep seeing your posts about energy markets. Do you know if any serious solar exhibition is happening in Nigeria this year? I need to find better suppliers. The ones I have now take four months to deliver and their warranties mean nothing. Please, if you know something, just tell me.” I wrote back the same afternoon and mentioned three words: NNEPIE, Lagos, September . He replied within minutes. “I am coming.” Ibrahim is not unique. In the past two months, I have received variations of the same question from a cold-chain operator in Onitsha, a pharmacist in Ilorin, and a Chinese panel manufacturer I met years ago at a trade show in Dubai. Everyone is looking for the same thing: a ...

  On a humid evening in Lagos last year, I sat in the darkness of my Victoria Island apartment, listening to the familiar hum of the neighbourhood generator. It was the third power outage that week. Across the street, a small business owner was counting the day’s losses. A few kilometres away, a hospital was running on its backup system, praying the fuel would last. This is the reality of Nigeria’s energy landscape—a country of immense potential and equally immense challenges. But for those who know where to look, it’s also a landscape of extraordinary opportunity. In the five years I’ve lived and worked in Lagos, I’ve watched the energy sector transform. Solar panels have multiplied on rooftops. Conversations about energy efficiency have moved from technical circles to dinner tables. And the  Nigeria International New Energy and Power Industry Expo  has grown into what many now call the most important energy gathering in West Africa. If you work in power, renewables, or ...

  The first time I realised our family routines had completely collapsed, I was standing in our kitchen at 11 p.m. on a school night, watching my daughter eat cereal while scrolling through her tablet. We had been in Lagos for three weeks. Our sleep schedules were chaotic, screen time had become a survival tool during the transition, and I couldn’t remember the last time we’d eaten a meal together at a normal hour. I told myself it was temporary. We were adjusting. Things would settle. They didn’t. Not until I stopped treating routines as optional and started treating them as the scaffolding our family needed to thrive in a new environment. Nigeria presents unique challenges for family routines. The traffic can turn a 20-minute commute into two hours. The power outages disrupt evening rituals. The heat affects sleep. And the sheer novelty of everything can make it feel impossible to establish any kind of normalcy. But here’s what I’ve learned over five years: routines aren’t just a...

  The first time my daughter came home from school and announced she wanted to learn the talking drum, I assumed it was a phase. Three weeks later, she’d convinced me to buy a dundun, found a teacher in our neighbourhood, and was practising rhythms that shook our apartment walls. A year later, she’d performed at her school’s cultural day, beaming as Nigerian parents cheered her on. That talking drum did more than teach her music. It gave her a connection to Nigerian culture that no amount of parental explaining could have provided. It gave her a skill her classmates admired. And it gave her a confidence that spilled over into everything else. After-school activities are more than just a way to fill time. In a new country, they’re a lifeline — a way to make friends, discover passions, and build a sense of belonging. Whether your child is a budding footballer, a budding artist, or just needs a place to burn energy after school, Lagos and Abuja have an astonishing range of options. Th...

  The first morning of my daughter’s new school in Lagos, I watched her walk through the gates with her backpack slung over one shoulder, her chin set with a determination that broke my heart a little. She didn’t cry. She didn’t look back. She disappeared into a classroom full of children she’d never met, in a country she barely knew, speaking English with accents she’d only heard from our house help. I stood there for twenty minutes, pretending to check emails, waiting to see if she’d come running out. She didn’t. By noon, she’d made three friends, learned a Nigerian hand‑clap game, and corrected my pronunciation of a classmate’s name. By evening, she informed me that “Daddy, you don’t know anything about how school works here.” She was right. I didn’t. And those first weeks were a blur of exhaustion, confusion, and quiet worry. But they were also the beginning of something remarkable: watching my child build a life in a new country with a resilience I hadn’t known she possessed. ...