According to the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM), merely three percent of Nigerians possess insurance coverage, while the remaining 97 percent, a substantial portion of the country’s estimated 200 million population, remain without insurance due to indecision or inadequate awareness of its benefits.
Dr. Usman Jankara, Assistant Director of Corporate Strategy and Special Duties at NAICOM, highlighted these statistics during a speech titled “Insurance Sector and the Nigerian Economy: Impact, Challenges, and New Frontiers” at a recent journalists’ seminar in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State.
According to him, the number of those insured is a paltry three million.
“From 2015 till date, when you look at gross premium income of the industry, we were at N282 billion in 2015, and today it is N736 billion, representing average growth of 15 per cent, he stated’’.
Jankara also put forward that, “That is not to say the industry couldn’t have done better, but to point to the fact that things are not as bad as they were today. The National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) noted that there has been no economy that has grown 15 per cent over a 10-year period. None of the sub-sectors have done that”.
“As of 2015, assets grew from N917 billion to N2.32 trillion in 2022, an exceptional growth of about 60 per cent. Our insurance penetration rate, that is insurance to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 0.4 per cent and the insurance density, that is, how many Nigerians are insured, is 1.5 per cent.”
Jankara maintained that life insurance grew from N86 billion in 2015 to N309.1 billion in 2022.
“Also, non-life insurance grew from N198.3 billion in 2015 to N417.3 billion in 2022”, he added.
Earlier in his welcome remarks at the event, NAICOM’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Sunday Thomas, said efforts on to deepen insurance sensitisation to achieve wider penetration.
