upward mobility

Here is the strange part. A country can grow richer every single year on paper and still leave most of its people exactly where they started. Nigeria's economy has expanded many times over since the 1980s, yet the child of a bricklayer in Ajegunle today does not automatically have better odds of becoming a doctor or a bank executive than that same child would have had forty years ago. Growth and mobility are cousins, not twins.

Upward mobility is simply this: can a person, or their children, end up earning more, owning more, and living better than the household they were born into. It is measured across generations more than within one payslip. A trader's daughter who becomes an engineer has moved up. A driver's son who becomes a driver too, however hardworking, has stayed where the family started.

What decides this is rarely just effort. It is schools that actually teach, roads that let goods reach market, electricity that keeps a small business alive past 6pm, and a labour market that hires on merit rather than on who your uncle knows. A Nigerian graduate from a state university in Kano with no connections faces a different climb than a graduate from a well funded private school in Lagos with a father who already sits on boards.

The United Kingdom likes to think of itself as a fair ladder, but studies there show a child born poor in Blackpool has a much harder climb than one born poor in London, because opportunity clusters around good schools, transport, and jobs. Nigerians abroad sending money home often become the mobility engine themselves, paying school fees for a niece in Enugu so she skips a rung her parents never got to stand on.

So when economists worry about mobility, they are really asking a quieter question underneath all the growth charts. Does this economy let a poor child's grandchild become rich, or does it just let the already rich stay rich while everyone else runs in place.