Foreign direct investment (FDI) flow into Nigeria climbed to roughly $4 billion last year, according to UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2026.

The report stated that “Inflows to Nigeria rose to about $4 billion, supported mainly by oil and gas–related IPF deals, including a major project valued at about $2 billion.”

The report indicated that Nigeria’s inflows were $1.6 billion in 2024, before increasing to roughly $4 billion (precisely $4.005 billion) in 2025 — reversing a downward trend that had seen inflows dip as low as $895 million in 2022. The figures place Nigeria among a cluster of West and East African economies that bucked a broader continental slowdown

According to the report, Nigeria’s outward investment also rose, from $408 million in 2024 to $1.19 billion in 2025, while its inward FDI stock reached nearly $93 billion by year-end.

“In Nigeria, deals included the sale of Shell’s onshore oil assets to the Nigerian consortium Renaissance Africa Energy and the acquisition of Lafarge Africa by Huaxin Cement of China, signaling both a wave of asset localization in the oil sector and continued Asian appetite for Nigerian industrial assets.

On the Greenfield side, conglomerate Dangote Group emerged as an outward investor in its own right, backing a $3 billion chemicals project in neighboring Ethiopia — one of the 10 largest Greenfield projects announced across the continent in 2025.

Policy shifts also featured prominently in the report’s account of the investment climate. It noted that the government introduced sweeping fiscal reforms during the year, including a new minimum tax regime aligned with international standards.

“Nigeria, for instance, introduced a minimum effective tax rate of 15 per cent for multinational enterprises with revenues exceeding €750 million,” the report noted.

Alongside this, the report observed that Nigeria, together with Cameroon, moved to tighten incentive structures more broadly, as the two countries “replaced broad tax exemptions with tiered tax credits and strict eligibility requirements, such as job creation, local value addition and priority sectors.” Separately, the government rolled out targeted relief for the petroleum sector, introducing “performance-based tax credits for companies in the upstream petroleum industry, linking fiscal benefits to cost efficiency.”

The report also credited Nigeria with using regulatory innovation to court investors beyond the extractive sector.

It pointed to the Federal Government ‘s technology-focused reforms, noting that Nigeria “has used regulatory frameworks to reduce uncertainty for innovative firms,” citing the Startup Act and accompanying central bank rules that let sandboxes allow start-ups to test products with real users before facing the full weight of regulation.

On trade infrastructure, the report named Nigeria as one of five countries — alongside Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Ghana and Togo — that committed under a regional agreement to harmonising customs and border procedures along the Abidjan–Lagos corridor, part of a wider West African push to cut transit times and integrate cross-border trade.

Africa as a whole, according to the report, saw FDI inflows fall sharply from an exceptional 2024, but the report noted that in West Africa, investment “rose in several West African economies, supported mainly by investment in natural resources and energy.”