Forget Oil! This Lesser Known and Underrated Skill Pays Millions and It’s Not Coding

During our unlocking possibilities workshop, titled Empowering Graduates to Think Beyond Jobs (t.ly/RjpTf), I asked the participants what kind of side hustle they could start with zero kobo. Their responses made me curious about some lesser-known skills that could earn a lot of money but were not widely exploited by people from the northern part of Nigeria.

One of the skills that caught my attention was animation and cartoon making. I discovered that very few people in our region were pursuing this as a career or a hobby. You can verify this by searching for cartoon and animation freelancers on platforms like Fiverr, Freelancer, or Upwork.

I realized the scarcity of these skills when we wanted to launch a project that involved creating animated characters that reflected our cultures and languages. To our surprise, only few people from our region could do the job for us.

While searching Fiverr, I discovered that some of the top-rated animators and cartoonists, who have earned the label of ‘Fiverr’s choice’, can charge up to USD 315 for a 15-second animation at the basic level. The same person can charge up to USD 610 or USD 1095 at the standard or premium level, respectively, for the same duration of video, with a maximum of four revisions.

In Naira terms, this means that a highly skilled and recognized animation cartoonist like Kevin R (t.ly/mD7le) can earn NGN 245,700 for a basic 15-second cartoon, NGN 475,800 for a standard one, and NGN 854,100 for a premium one, assuming that $1 is equivalent to NGN 780.

Based on this, I believe that animation and cartoon making skills are very promising and lucrative, and that our people should take them seriously and develop them further.

If you are interested in learning some basics of animation and illustration, you can check out some free courses on LinkedIn via this link t.ly/amYbC.