Nigerian government and public data APIs: a builder's guide

Most guides for Nigerian developers go deep on payments, KYC, and SMS. Those categories are well covered. But building a complete product often means pulling in weather forecasts for your logistics routes, official inflation data for your fintech dashboard, teacher credentials for your edtech verification flow, or authoritative boundary polygons for your coverage maps.

Nigeria has a set of verified, free government and public data sources that most builders have never touched. Nine of them are indexed in the Wycord registry. Here is what each one delivers and when to use it.

Official government verification and compliance APIs

NiMet Weather API

The Nigerian Meteorological Agency operates an official weather API that returns Nigeria-specific forecast data. It is free and requires no authentication. Documentation is sparse but the service was verified operational as of June 2026.

Most commercial weather APIs charge per call. NiMet does not. If your logistics dispatch, agritech recommendation engine, or event platform only needs Nigerian coverage, this is the free official alternative.

NiMet Weather on Wycord

OpenSanctions (NIGSAC)

OpenSanctions provides structured access to Nigeria's NIGSAC sanctions list, which contains 138 sanctioned entities. The data is updated daily and accessible via three REST endpoints: a matching API for screening entities, an entities API for full record lookup, and a search API for full-text queries. Bulk download is also available.

Pricing is transparent: free for non-commercial use, journalism, civil society, and academic research. Commercial applications pay per query with no contract lock-in.

Use it for AML compliance checks in your fintech, vendor due diligence workflows, or any product that needs to screen Nigerian counterparties against an official list. The matching API returns scored candidates, which makes integrating it into a KYC pipeline straightforward.

OpenSanctions NIGSAC on Wycord

TRCN Teacher Verification

The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria operates a verification lookup that confirms whether a person holds a valid TRCN teaching license. You can search by TID, NIN, phone number, email, or TRCN registration number. Name search is not supported. No API key is required.

Use it in edtech products that need to verify instructor credentials, HR tools doing background checks for schools, or any platform that needs to confirm a candidate's professional teaching status against the national register.

TRCN Teacher Verification on Wycord

Economic and financial datasets

CBN Statistics Database

The Central Bank of Nigeria publishes monthly Naira exchange rate tables covering USD (via three market segments: DAS, IFEM, and BDC), British Pounds, Euro, and CFA Francs. All tables are exportable to Excel. The database also covers money-market rates, government securities yields, foreign reserves, and balance of payments data. No sign-up required.

Use it for historical NGN rate analysis, fintech dashboards that surface macro context alongside transaction data, or lending and pricing models that need to account for currency movement over time.

CBN Statistics Database on Wycord

NBS Nigeria CPI and Inflation Data

The National Bureau of Statistics publishes monthly Consumer Price Index reports tracking 934 product varieties across 13 COICOP-2018 divisions. Separate indices are published for Urban, Rural, Headline, Food, and Core baskets. The dataset runs through August 2026 and is available in PDF, Excel, and ZIP format. No registration required.

The base year is 2024 and the weight reference period is 2023, reflecting the most recent rebasing. Use it for inflation-adjusted pricing logic, lending risk models, or any Nigerian financial product that needs to show users how purchasing power has shifted.

NBS Nigeria CPI on Wycord

Nigeria IMF WEO MCP

For teams building AI agent workflows, there is a free, open-source MCP server (MIT license) that wraps IMF World Economic Outlook data for Nigeria, including historical records and forward projections for GDP growth, inflation, government debt, current account balance, and unemployment. Install it with:

npx -y @braynexservices/nigeria-mcp-imf-weo

It calls the live IMF DataMapper API without requiring an API key. Use it when building Claude or other agent-based tools that need macroeconomic context for Nigeria without custom data plumbing.

Nigeria IMF WEO MCP on Wycord

Geographic and administrative data

LGA Boundaries (GRID3)

GRID3 publishes authoritative polygon boundaries for all 36 Nigerian states plus the Federal Capital Territory. Available in GeoJSON and Shapefile format. No authentication required, free, and backed by GRID3's Open Source Geospatial Foundation standards.

Use it for logistics routing apps that need to assign pickups to service zones, health facility coverage maps, or any product that needs to match a user's location to an official LGA.

LGA Boundaries GRID3 on Wycord

GRID3 Nigeria Settlement Extents v4.0

Released in March 2026 by CIESIN/Columbia University via the GRID3 hub, this dataset maps Nigerian settlements as spatial blocks with building counts, building heights (sourced from Google Open Buildings 2.5D), and vegetation indices (Sentinel-2 NDVI and EVI metrics). Format is OGC GeoPackage. License is CC BY-SA 4.0. Free.

Use it for coverage analysis, identifying underserved market areas, estimating population density at the settlement level, or as labeled geospatial training data for ML models.

GRID3 Settlement Extents on Wycord

naija-state-local-government (npm)

A zero-dependency npm package that ships Nigerian states, LGAs, senatorial districts, wards, and polling units as structured JSON. Install via npm and query directly in any JavaScript or TypeScript project, no network call required at runtime.

Use it for address form dropdowns, routing logic, or any feature that needs a clean, queryable map of Nigerian administrative divisions embedded directly in your application.

naija-state-local-government on Wycord

What to use when

Use case	Resource
Nigerian weather data for logistics or agritech	NiMet Weather API
AML or vendor sanctions screening	OpenSanctions NIGSAC
Verify a teacher's TRCN license	TRCN Teacher Verification
Historical NGN exchange rates	CBN Statistics Database
Inflation data for lending or pricing models	NBS Nigeria CPI
Macroeconomic projections in AI agents	Nigeria IMF WEO MCP
LGA polygon boundaries for maps or routing	GRID3 LGA Boundaries
Settlement density and building footprints	GRID3 Settlement Extents v4.0
State and LGA dropdowns without a network call	naija-state-local-government

All nine resources above are verified and indexed in the Wycord registry. Browse the full catalog of Nigerian APIs and datasets at wycord.com/best/apis-in-nigeria.