The Training Was Never Built for Us
There is a particular kind of silence that comes after you realise the tools you have spent years mastering were never designed for the problem in front of you.
I know that silence well.
I am an economist. Not in the casual sense. I mean I went through the full formation: the Keynesian frameworks, the rational actor models, the definitions of wants and needs that sit at the foundation of every economic recommendation, every policy brief, every international development report. I absorbed the assumption that humans are rational beings who will, when given the right information and the right incentives, make the decisions that are best for them. I built my thinking on that foundation. I wrote my master’s thesis on it. I earned a PhD inside it.
And then I kept watching African economies, Nigeria especially, behave in ways the training couldn’t explain.
What the Theory Promises
The standard economic canon is not without logic. The Keynesian tradition, the neoclassical synthesis, the frameworks that underpin IMF structural adjustment programmes and World Bank development strategies — they are internally coherent. They have produced results, in certain places, under certain conditions.
The problem is the assumption embedded in all of it: that the unit of economic analysis is a rational individual, operating in something close to a vacuum, responding predictably to price signals and policy levers. From this assumption, everything follows; how we model consumer behaviour, how we design cash transfer programmes, how we structure trade agreements, how we measure whether a policy has “worked.”
This assumption holds reasonably well in the economies where it was built. It holds less well when you cross certain borders.
Where It Broke Down for Me
During my master’s research on regional trade agreements in Africa, I encountered a puzzle that would not leave me alone. The same models that nations in Europe and Asia had used to build stronger, more coordinated economic blocs were producing different outcomes on this continent. Not slightly different — structurally different. Nations were signing the agreements. The frameworks were being adopted. And yet the integration, the growth, the coordinated voice on the global stage — it wasn’t following.
I was curious enough to pursue it. Curious enough to start with West Africa, then broaden. Curious enough to complete a PhD in 2023, still on the same research question. And still not satisfied.
Because the more I read, the clearer it became that the gap was not in the policies. It was in the assumptions underneath the policies. The people those policies were designed for — their cultures, their household structures, their historical relationships with institutions, their entirely rational but context-specific ways of making decisions — were not in the model.
The Assumption Gap
The April 2026 World Bank Africa Economic Update describes Africa’s growth challenge as “structural, reflected in low investment, weak productivity, and limited job creation,” and notes that past industrial policy efforts “often failed due to weak implementation capacity, fiscal and institutional constraints.” This is accurate as far as it goes. But it stops short of the deeper question: why does implementation keep failing? Why do fiscal and institutional constraints persist across decades of reform programmes and billions in development finance?
The answer, at least in part, is that you cannot successfully implement policies built on assumptions that don’t match the people they’re meant to serve.
Consider one example from my own research. Conditional cash transfer programmes in Latin America, some of the most cited successes in development economics, worked in part because of a specific behavioural finding: when cash was transferred to women rather than men in the household, the money was significantly more likely to be spent on children’s education and household wellbeing. The programme designers studied actual household behaviour, not theoretical household behaviour. They adjusted the mechanism accordingly. The result was measurably different.
This is not a gender story. It is an assumptions story. The researchers asked: who actually makes what decisions, and why? That question — that insistence on understanding the real human being rather than the theoretical one — made the difference between a policy that worked and one that would have transferred money into a void.
We do not ask that question often enough in African economic policy. And I think it is because the training doesn’t teach us to.
What I Am Doing About It
I am not abandoning economics. I am extending it.
What I am doing in my consulting work, in my research, and now in my writing, is insisting that cultural context, psychological history, and behavioural reality belong inside the economic analysis. Not as soft add-ons to be noted in a limitations section. As core assumptions that should shape what we recommend and how.
This is not a new idea globally. Behavioural economics has been a growing field for decades. Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, Esther Duflo — the Nobel prizes tell you where the frontier is moving. But the application of these insights to African economies, in a way that is grounded in African social structures and historical realities, is still sparse. And the translation of that work into language that ordinary Nigerians — not just researchers and policymakers — can access and use to think more clearly about their own economic lives? That is almost nonexistent.
That is the gap I intend to fill.
What This Space Will Be
This is not a space for emotional reactions to economic news. Nigeria has enough of those. Every exchange rate movement, every fuel price adjustment, every IMF projection triggers waves of outrage or despair that feel satisfying but produce no understanding.
Understanding is harder. It requires sitting with complexity, holding two things that seem contradictory as both being true, and asking not just what is happening but why, and what the research actually shows, as opposed to what feels right.
That is what I will offer here: an economist’s analysis, grounded in research, honest about what we know and what we don’t, and insisting that the people of Nigeria and Africa are not an afterthought in the story of their own economies.
The training was never built for us. It is time to build something that
