IMF Slashes Nigeria’s Economic Growth Forecast To 3.1%

International Monetary Fund (IMF) has cut its forecast for Nigeria’s economic growth in 2024 to 3.1 per cent.
The downgrade is contained in a newly released report ‘in the July 2024 World Economic Outlook’ published on Tuesday as the financial institution cited a weaker growth recorded in the first quarter of the year, Q1’24 as reason for the new forecast.
The downgrade followed weaker-than-expected Gross Domestic Product, GDP, and growth recorded by the country in Q1’23.
It would be recalled that, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), showed that Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), growth dropped, quarter-on-quarter, to 2.98 per cent in Q1 from 3.46 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2023, Q3.
As a result of the lower forecast for Nigeria’s economic growth, the IMF also downgraded its forecast for Sub-Saharan economic growth in 2024 to 3.7 per cent from the April WEO forecast of 3.8 per cent.
It however raised its economic growth forecast for the region in 2025 to 4.1 per cent from 4.0.
According to the IMF, the forecast for growth in sub-Saharan Africa is revised downward, mainly as a result of a 0.2 percentage point downward revision to the growth outlook in Nigeria amid weaker than expected activity in the first quarter of this year.