Nigeria climbed 7 places to 11th out of 31 countries in Rand Merchant Bank's Where to Invest in Africa 2026/27 ranking, released on Tuesday. No other country moved up as far. A year ago it sat 18th, after dropping 9 places.
It's still 1 spot short of the top 10. Seychelles, Mauritius and Egypt hold the top 3 for a 3rd straight year, and Morocco took 4th from South Africa, which slipped to 5th. RMB scores each country on 20 metrics in 4 groups: economic performance, market access and innovation, investment climate, and social and human development.
Where West Africa landed
Côte d'Ivoire ranks 7th, up from 8th, which puts it 4 places ahead of Nigeria and keeps it as the region's best-rated market. Senegal went the other way. It fell 5 places to 19th, the biggest drop in this edition, and now sits 8 places below Nigeria.
For a Lagos manufacturer or fund manager pitching to foreign partners, the 7-place gain is a useful line in the deck. It also says where the money is coming from.
Hot money, mostly
RMB's numbers show capital inflows into Nigeria of about $23.2bn in 2025, up from $12.3bn in 2024, roughly 1.9x (STATART calculation). Then look at the mix. Portfolio money made up 85% of it, $19.74bn, while foreign direct investment was 4%, just $923m. That's about $21 of portfolio cash for every $1 of FDI (STATART calculation).
Portfolio flows buy treasury bills and listed shares. They don't build factories in Ogun State or warehouses in Kano, and they can leave in a week. The pace isn't slowing: inflows reached $10.4bn in Q1 2026 alone, equal to 45% of the whole of 2025 in 3 months (STATART calculation).
RMB credits the climb to the 2023 fuel subsidy removal and the merging of the exchange rate windows, plus the rebasing that lifted 2024 GDP from about $188bn to about $243bn.
A better rank won't put cranes on sites by itself. If next year's edition shows FDI growing faster than portfolio money, a climb into the top 10 will look earned; if the mix stays at 85% portfolio, the ranking is mostly measuring how attractive its yields are.
Figures are as reported at the time of writing. STATART news is written by Frank Brother (Markets), Christina Amgbari (Insights) and Ebipadei Joseph (Lifestyle), and checked before publication.