For years, one of the hardest questions for Nigerian professionals to answer has been deceptively simple:

How much should I be earning?

Ask someone what a particular role pays and the answer is often based on hearsay, an old job advert, a friend’s experience or a salary conversation that happened years ago.

Afolabi Sokeye kept getting that question from friends and family.

People wanted to know what they should earn in their respective roles, how much to ask for during an interview and whether an offer was actually competitive.

The repeated questions eventually became the idea behind Salary Index, a compensation-intelligence platform designed to give Nigerian professionals a clearer view of what the market pays.

Today, the platform is being used by professionals researching salaries, preparing for interviews and trying to understand where their compensation sits within the wider market.

Turning an everyday question into a product

The idea behind Salary Index came from a problem that was already familiar to many Nigerian workers.

Salary information existed, but it was scattered.

People compared notes in WhatsApp groups. Others searched through old social-media posts or relied on salary conversations with friends working in similar industries.

The problem was that these numbers rarely came with enough context.

A salary without information about the person's experience, seniority, location, industry or company type can be difficult to interpret.

Sokeye's answer was to create a centralised platform where compensation information could be searched and compared more systematically.

Salary Index describes itself as a compensation-intelligence platform for Nigerian professionals and employers, with listings organised by role, level, industry and location.

It is more than a list of salaries

One of the platform's more important design choices is that it does not treat every salary figure as equally reliable.

According to Salary Index, its data can come from professionals reporting their own compensation, public salary surveys, community datasets, company career pages, corporate reports and other publicly available sources.

The platform labels entries according to their source.

Some figures are marked verified, meaning the submission was checked against supporting evidence such as a payslip, offer letter, work email or LinkedIn profile.

Other figures are identified as company reported when the company itself has publicly disclosed the compensation.

That distinction gives users more context when interpreting a number.

Privacy is central to the model

Salary information is sensitive.

Someone may be willing to share what they earn to improve salary transparency without wanting their employer, colleagues or the public to know exactly who submitted the figure.

Salary Index says its approach is therefore to publish the compensation information while removing identifying details.

Its published methodology says names, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles and uploaded supporting documents are not made public.

The company also says verification materials are used to confirm submissions and then discarded rather than being retained as part of the public dataset.

That creates an important balance: more transparency about pay without turning individual workers into public salary profiles.

Why salary benchmarking matters

Salary negotiations are often conducted with incomplete information.

An applicant might be asked for salary expectations without knowing what comparable professionals earn.

Someone preparing for a promotion may know what they currently make but have little information about what the market considers competitive.

And employers face the opposite problem.

A company trying to hire competitively needs to know whether the salary it is offering is realistic for a particular role and experience level.

Salary Index is attempting to put both sides closer to the same information.

Its platform allows users to explore compensation by factors including role, level, industry and location rather than looking at one generic salary figure.

The numbers need context

Salary transparency, however, does not mean every number should be treated as a definitive market rate.

A software engineer working remotely for an international company may earn dramatically more than another engineer with a similar title working for a local company.

The same applies to marketers, designers, product managers, analysts and other professionals.

Experience, company type, location, client geography, responsibilities, technical skills and compensation structure can all influence pay.

Salary Index's own methodology reflects this by classifying roles according to what people actually do, rather than relying solely on job titles.

It also converts different compensation structures into a comparable monthly figure while retaining information about factors such as currency and whether the amount is gross or net.

That is important because a single salary figure without context can create just as much confusion as having no data at all.

From personal project to compensation infrastructure

Sokeye's background also helps explain the product's direction.

His profile describes Salary Index as a compensation-intelligence platform for African professionals and employers, while his previous work has included product and technology projects.

The ambition extends beyond helping one person negotiate a better offer.

Salary Index says Nigeria is its starting point, with a longer-term goal of building compensation data infrastructure across Africa.

That could become increasingly valuable as African professionals work across borders and companies hire talent remotely across multiple countries.

A compensation database that can eventually compare roles, markets and industries across African economies would be significantly more useful than isolated salary conversations on social media.

The bigger opportunity is the data

There is another reason platforms like Salary Index are becoming interesting.

Compensation data can be useful to more than job seekers.

HR teams can use salary benchmarks when building compensation bands.

Founders can use market information when deciding what they can realistically offer early employees.

Recruiters can use it to prepare candidates and clients.

Professionals can use it before interviews, promotions or salary negotiations.

And over time, aggregated compensation data could reveal broader trends in how African labour markets are changing.

Which roles are becoming more valuable?

Which skills command higher premiums?

Are salaries rising in line with inflation?

Which cities pay more?

How different are local and internationally remote roles?

Those questions require data rather than anecdotes.

But salary data has to keep improving

The platform's growth also comes with an important challenge: data quality.

Self-reported salary information can be valuable, but it can also contain errors, outdated figures or unusual cases that do not represent the wider market.

A small dataset can also produce misleading conclusions when filtered too narrowly by role, level and location.

That makes verification, source labelling and sample size increasingly important as Salary Index grows.

The platform's decision to show how each figure was sourced is therefore not a minor feature. It is central to whether users can responsibly interpret the information.

A new way to approach salary negotiations

The cultural impact could ultimately be just as important as the technology.

In markets where discussing salaries is uncomfortable, workers often negotiate from a position of uncertainty.

They know what they currently earn.

They may know what they want.

But they do not necessarily know what comparable roles are paying.

Salary Index is trying to change that dynamic by making compensation information easier to access.

The goal is not necessarily to tell someone exactly what salary they should demand.

It is to give them a reference point before they walk into the conversation.

Salary Index is built around a simple but powerful idea:

You cannot negotiate effectively for a number you have no way of benchmarking.

For Nigerian professionals, where salary information has traditionally been fragmented across personal networks, social-media posts and informal conversations, a searchable compensation database could make career decisions more data-driven.

But the real test will be whether Salary Index can continue building a sufficiently large, current and well-verified dataset.

If it can, the platform could evolve from a useful salary-search tool into something much bigger: a layer of compensation intelligence for Nigeria's growing digital workforce and, eventually, the wider African labour market.