In today’s JapaInsights, I’m sharing my observations on Nigeria as a major source of international students to the United Kingdom. Nigeria has been the leading African source country for UK students over the past few years.
For instance, in the 2020-21 academic year, 21,305 Nigerian students were enrolled at UK universities. This represents a nearly 64% increase over the 2019-20 figure.
With the current 2022-23 academic year, the number has risen. This is supported by British Home Office figures, which show that as of June 2022, 486,868 sponsored study visas were granted to international students for the year, a 71% increase over 2019 and the highest to date.
To better understand what is happening, we explored the public dataset published by the UK Visa and immigration that contained the outcomes of applications for entry clearance visas between 2005 to 2022 Q3.
| Year | Visa Issues | Approval Rates |
| 2005 | 7130 | 29.13533835 |
| 2006 | 7173 | 26.08837971 |
| 2007 | 9579 | 35.8173796 |
| 2008 | 13536 | 41.84881744 |
| 2009 | 13190 | 55.89219882 |
| 2010 | 13779 | 71.19090674 |
| 2011 | 13402 | 78.77505437 |
| 2012 | 12564 | 79.63491158 |
| 2013 | 13194 | 80.67257719 |
| 2014 | 11100 | 83.74198416 |
| 2015 | 9515 | 85.89095505 |
| 2016 | 6670 | 85.42520492 |
| 2017 | 5971 | 85.79022989 |
| 2018 | 6506 | 86.89728863 |
| 2019 | 7674 | 90.17626322 |
| 2020 | 9637 | 95.04882138 |
| 2021 | 24571 | 96.4022285 |
| 2022 | 44944 | 97.96843666 |
Here is what we discovered:
1. More Nigerians have left Nigeria to study in the UK in the last 2 years than in the previous 8 years combined.
2. UK study visa approval rate for Nigerians is at 98% this year. What this means is that almost everyone who submitted an application at the UKVI for a student visa this year got their visa approved.
It is interesting to note that the UK post-study visa was abolished in 2012. Our analysis shows that immediately after this happened, there was a downward trend in the number of Visa approvals(and by implication, the number of applications) between 2012 to 2020.
The post-study route was reintroduced in July 2021 and guess what? Boom, the UK became the Study abroad destination for most Nigerians.
In subsequent editions of #JapaInsights, we will look at what the data says about Canada, the USA, Australia, and Germany.