Nigeria’s rising demand for skills is creating new business opportunity around something the country already has in abundance: knowledge.

Across universities, businesses, professional offices and entrepreneurial communities, Nigerians possess years of accumulated expertise, but much of it remains confined to classrooms, workplaces and one-to-one professional relationships.

A new digital platform, Spoilert, is thus seeking to change that by providing marketplace through which educators, professionals, entrepreneurs, institutions and other knowledge providers can package their expertise into structured digital learning products and make them available to learners beyond their immediate environments.

The Chief Executive Officer of Spoilert, Dr. Opeyemi Abe, stated this while engaging educators, professionals and other stakeholders in Ilorin, Kwara State where he urged knowledge providers to take their expertise beyond the traditional classroom.

Abe said Spoilert was created to enable individuals and institutions to package, share and potentially earn from their knowledge through structured learning products known as “Spoylz”.

A Spoylz can combine videos, PDFs, slides and text, organised into modules and lessons. The platform allows creators to publish and manage their learning products, build portfolios around their areas of expertise and monitor indicators including views, enrolments, ratings and earnings.

The proposition comes at a time when the demand for digital and professional skills is expanding rapidly in Nigeria.

A World Bank analysis estimates that Nigeria’s labour force will require approximately 28 million workers trained in digital skills by 2030, with about 45 per cent of jobs expected to require digital skills. The projected demand cuts across agriculture, industry and services, with the services sector alone expected to require about 19.5 million digitally trained workers.

The scale of the emerging digital-learning market also provides an indication of the commercial opportunity. Ken Research estimates Nigeria’s e-learning and digital-training market at about $400 million, while a separate estimate by the same research firm puts the broader e-learning and corporate-training market at about $1.5 billion. The figures cover different market definitions and should therefore not be combined, but both indicate significant demand for digital learning and professional development.

Nigeria’s expanding digital audience provides another part of the opportunity. DataReportal reported 107 million internet users in Nigeria in January 2025, representing internet penetration of 45.4 per cent, alongside 150 million cellular mobile connections.

For Spoilert, the opportunity is therefore not limited to conventional students.

An Ilorin-based accountant, for instance, could package practical knowledge about managing accounts for small businesses into a digital course. A civil engineer could develop lessons on construction management. An entrepreneur could document the practical steps involved in building a business. A journalist could turn years of newsroom experience into a course on reporting and investigative techniques.

The common denominator is that knowledge which previously reached a relatively small number of people can potentially be structured once and made available to a much larger audience.

This is the central idea behind Spoilert’s model: knowledge can become a reusable digital asset.

For educators, the platform provides tools to create, organise, publish and update learning materials without requiring specialised technical skills. Creators can combine different formats, define learning outcomes and organise their content into modules and lessons.

They can also monitor the performance of their Spoylz, including enrolments, views, ratings and earnings, while maintaining a portfolio of their learning products.

Abe said the model is not restricted to individual educators and professionals, stressing that universities and other institutions can also use Spoilert to extend courses, lectures, research-based materials and other learning resources beyond their campuses.

This could give higher institutions another avenue for reaching alumni, professionals, entrepreneurs and members of the wider public, while providing individual lecturers and researchers with a mechanism for building digital teaching portfolios around their expertise.

The institutional opportunity is particularly relevant to university towns such as Ilorin, where higher institutions, professional bodies, businesses and other organisations generate and consume large volumes of specialised knowledge.

A course developed by an Ilorin-based institution, for example, could potentially serve learners outside Kwara State without requiring them to travel to the city.

The same model could allow a professional association to distribute continuing education materials, a company to train employees across different locations or an organisation to provide specialised skills training to beneficiaries.

Spoilert’s proposition also extends to people who may not be able to afford learning opportunities themselves.

Through its “Sponsor a Spoylz” initiative, individuals and organisations can sponsor another learner’s access to a learning product. The model could potentially be used by companies, foundations, professional associations and individuals seeking to support students, young people or workers acquiring new skills.

Abe said the initiative provides another avenue for people to gain access to knowledge and skills that might otherwise be beyond their financial reach.

The platform’s model is built around four activities — learn, teach, earn and grow — reflecting an attempt to connect the demand for knowledge with the people and institutions that possess it.

But the emergence of the market also highlights the challenges Spoilert and similar platforms will have to overcome.

Nigeria’s digital expansion remains uneven. While the country had 107 million internet users at the beginning of 2025, that still represented less than half of the population, leaving a large offline population.

Internet costs, device affordability, connectivity, digital literacy and trust in online learning remain important considerations. There is also the question of content quality: as more people become able to publish courses, platforms must ensure that learners can distinguish credible, useful and current knowledge from poorly prepared material.

Spoilert says its platform places emphasis on the quality and credibility of learning materials, requiring creators to provide accurate, relevant and up-to-date content while respecting originality and intellectual property. Users can also report inappropriate content or misconduct.

For Nigeria, however, the broader opportunity extends beyond any single platform.

The country is entering an economy in which the ability to acquire, update and transfer knowledge is becoming increasingly important. The World Bank’s projection of 28 million workers requiring digital skills by 2030 illustrates the scale of that challenge.

The commercial opportunity, consequently, may not simply lie in selling online courses. It could lie in building the infrastructure through which Nigeria’s existing pool of expertise can be organised and connected with people who need it.

That is the space Spoilert is seeking to occupy — connecting the lecturer with the learner, the professional with the aspiring professional, the institution with its wider audience and the expert with people who may never have had access to that expertise in a conventional classroom.

For Abe and Spoilert, the objective is to make that exchange possible digitally, one Spoylz and potentially one learner at a time.