The Nigerians in Diaspora Commission has registered more than 100,000 Nigerians on its Diaspora Data Mapping Portal as of November 2025, data from the commission’s Technology, Transfer, Innovation, and Investment Department have shown.
The data, obtained by our correspondent on Saturday, underscored the difficulty of capturing accurate information on Nigeria’s estimated 17 million citizens living abroad.
The Diaspora Data Mapping initiative, launched on June 29, 2021, was created to gather detailed demographic and socio-economic data on Nigerians in the diaspora.
The portal is accessible online and operates under the commission’s mandate in line with the National Diaspora Policy 2021, providing insights into the distribution, skills and professional profiles of registered Nigerians overseas.
The commission acknowledged that “limited resources have hindered efforts to capture diaspora data comprehensively.”
It noted that registered users currently account for only a small fraction of Nigerians living outside the country.
According to the data, Cameroon hosts the highest number of Nigerians abroad with 6.699 per cent, followed by Niger with 6.641 per cent and Sudan with 6.076 per cent, while significant populations were also recorded in Ghana, Benin and South Africa.
Outside Africa, the United Kingdom, United States and Saudi Arabia were listed among the top destinations, with Canada, Egypt, Germany, France and India also accounting for large shares of the diaspora population.
The report further showed that many Nigerians abroad work in the healthcare sector, with nurses accounting for 29.97 per cent, pharmacists 14 per cent and medical doctors 12.03 per cent, while education, engineering and civil service roles also featured prominently.
