Power and finance top every list. The operating model never appears. Why that matters.
Ask Nigerian firms what holds them back and they name electricity and finance. Both are real. But the questions measure the business environment, not the business, so the constraints a leadership team controls never show up.
Crelligent Research5 min read
What firms say
The World Bank's 2025 Enterprise Survey asked 1,043 Nigerian firms to choose their single biggest obstacle from a list of 15. Electricity came first, chosen by 27.6% of firms, more than twice the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 11.0%. Access to finance came second at 23.2%1.
The figures behind those answers are stark. Firms experienced 10.9 electrical outages in a typical month, against 6.6 across Sub-Saharan Africa. Three-quarters of investment (75.8%) was financed from the firm's own funds, and just 1.5% by banks1.
PwC's 2024 survey of 567 MSMEs found the same order: inadequate access to finance was the number one challenge for 35%, unreliable power was a major challenge for 21%, then multiple taxation (12%), skilled labour (11%) and insecurity (10%)2.
What the questions leave out
Both surveys ask about the business environment: power, credit, tax, crime, regulation. None of their lists includes "the way our work is organised" or "decisions that wait for the CEO". Respondents cannot name a constraint that is not on the list.
That does not make the environment unimportant. A firm that loses power ten times a month has a real problem. But two firms facing the same grid and the same banks do not perform the same. The difference between them is how they are run, and that is the part leadership controls.
The World Bank's own management data hints at it. Nigerian firms with 20 or more workers score 80.6 out of 100 on acting when a problem arises, but 27.3 on dealing with under-performance and 34.8 on setting achievable targets1. Firms that run on firefighting feel every outage and every cash squeeze more sharply, because there is no system absorbing the shock.
What the AEHI measures instead
The African Enterprise Health Index does not ask firms to rank obstacles. It scores how each enterprise is run across the five ESRE OS layers, from Business Design to Governance, through the diagnostic. The question changes from "what is in your way?" to "how well does your business work, given what is in its way?"
Our working hypothesis, which the inaugural edition will test, is that the Operating Model (L2) is the most common primary constraint, even for firms that would name power or finance first.
Take the free diagnostic, answer the five-minute Executive Barometer, or see the evidence charts.
Sources
- 1.Enterprise Surveys: Nigeria 2025 Country Profile, World Bank, 2025. 1,043 firms, fieldwork February to September 2025. enterprisesurveys.org
- 2.PwC's 2024 MSME Survey, PwC Nigeria, 2024. 567 MSMEs across 13 sectors and 29 states. pwc.com
These are published third-party figures, not AEHI results. The inaugural AEHI edition, which measures Nigerian mid-market enterprises directly through the ESRE OS diagnostic, is in preparation.
