Does Being a Data Analyst Pay in Nigeria? We Asked 3 of Them

At her best, Ola Dike earned ₦100,000 ($75) a month as a call centre agent. Now, she said, one data analysis project, a little over a week of work, has paid her as much as ₦500,000 ($375).

“Absolutely,” Dike said, when asked whether that money now matches what she has put into her career. Then she reconsidered. “Well, not yet.”

What she has put in began with a raised hand. When no job opened in her field of environmental management and ecology, Dike took a job at a call centre and volunteered when her employer needed someone to analyse its call data in Excel: call volumes, average handling times, abandoned calls. That made her an MIS analyst and set the ball rolling.

By her count, she has paid about ₦200,000 ($148) for one programme, ₦300,000 ($220) for another and between ₦1.3 million ($962) and ₦1.6 million ($1,184) for a course from MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, on top of others she can no longer recall.

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“The prices are just outrageous,” she said.

The three she remembers come to between ₦1.8 million and ₦2.1 million, or $1,350 to $1,575: a year and a half to nearly two years of the best pay she drew at the call centre.

But it’s not the answer the industry’s reputation would predict. High salaries, remote jobs and stories of financial success have made a tech skill look like a ticket, close to a guaranteed one, to good money.

“Tech pays well,” Dike said. “But right now I’m not there where it pays.”

Techloy asked her and two other Nigerian data analysts to put numbers on what a career in tech has cost them and what it has paid in return, from their first gig to the work they do today. Their answers suggest the question is less about whether tech pays than how long it takes.

The first reward can be small

Timothy Alabi’s cost was a fraction of Dike’s finance cost. A statistics undergraduate at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, he taught himself from YouTube, then paid about ₦20,000 ($15) for a six-month Coursera subscription. His first income, about ₦5,000 ($3.75), was a quarter of that, and by his own estimate it arrived three to five months after he finished his first data analysis programme.

It also came with a deadline. A final-year student at another university needed her project analysed before a Tuesday defence, and Alabi, who had never done such a job, finished it on the Monday after sleepless nights.

“I just want to prove my own name,” he said. “It wasn't about the money at that point in time.”

Dike reached the same instinct on a costlier road.

“You need to start free because you need to prove yourself,” she said, and for a while she took unpaid assignments and went looking for free internships. Some of the people she had worked for later began to pay, and one of her earliest fees, she thinks, fell between ₦150,000 and ₦200,000, more than her best month at the call centre, though she cannot be sure of the figure.

In each case, the next payment came from someone who had already seen the work. Alabi’s student had a supervisor who, by her account, had often sent other students’ analysis back; she was impressed, and other students were soon referred to him. A mentor has since referred him to more jobs than he can count.

But the income has climbed since. Alabi now works at BD Analysis and freelances on the side, including data analysis for students’ research and theses. Some jobs pay ₦50,000 to ₦100,000 ($37–$75); his freelance rates run from ₦150,000 to ₦300,000 ($112–$225), depending on the volume and complexity of the work.

A freelance rate is only a promise until a client agrees to it, and the project pays once. Between jobs, nothing comes in: “There are times that none will even show up,” Alabi said.

A steady salary can help bridge those gaps, but the analysts did not disclose their current salaries.

The nearest Alabi came was a standby arrangement, in which a client keeps him on payroll as its analyst. He has charged more than ₦200,000 for it, paid “sometimes on salary basis, sometimes on wages,” though he did not say over what period.

Years in the field do not tell the whole story

Edidiong Udofia, the most senior of the three, with nearly eight years in data-related work and now in clinical research in Abuja, prefers not to disclose his salary.