Making debt visible.
Making girls matter.

This series tackled one of the most complex challenges in public communication: making macroeconomic data feel personal. Across seven charts, we translated Nigeria's debt crisis from abstract statistics into visceral visual comparisons — debt servicing against health and education, fiscal chokehold over revenue, debt-to-GDP breach into crisis territory, budget implementation gaps, per capita allocation failures, total debt growth trajectory, and the hidden cost of naira depreciation.

Each graphic was designed to function as a standalone social media asset while building towards a coherent narrative across the full series. CISD's brand palette — deep navy, institutional blue, and crisis red — was applied with precision to signal severity without sensationalism.

"Nine Million Empty Desks" is CISD's landmark report on the nine million out-of-school girls in Nigeria — a crisis at the intersection of debt, gender inequality, poverty, and institutional failure. GX designed the entire visual experience: from the arresting opening illustration of a girl walking past a school compound, through data-heavy sections on the scale of the crisis and its root causes, to the policy recommendations and closing call to action.

The design challenge was to hold two registers simultaneously — emotionally urgent and analytically credible. We achieved this through a deliberate visual grammar: stark typographic pull-quotes anchored by large red numerals, paired with restrained body text on soft grey panels, and illustrated narrative pages that placed human stories at the centre of statistical arguments.