Deep Structural Reforms Guided by Evidence Are Urgently Needed to Lift Millions of Nigerians Out of Poverty, says New World Bank Report
Abuja, March 22, 2022 – Sluggish growth, low human capital, labor market weaknesses, and exposure to shocks are holding Nigeria’s poverty reduction back says a new World Bank report “A Better Future for All Nigerians: Nigeria Poverty Assessment 2022”. The report represents the culmination of the World Bank’s engagement on poverty- and inequality-relevant data and analytics in Nigeria in the past two years. It draws primarily on the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey (NLSS), which provided Nigeria’s first official poverty numbers in almost a decade, as well as the Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey (NLPS). These surveys were implemented by Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in collaboration with the World Bank.
According to the report, which brings together the latest evidence on the profile and drivers of poverty in Nigeria, as many as 4 in 10 Nigerians live below the national poverty line. Many Nigerians – especially in the country’s north – also lack education and access to basic infrastructure, such as electricity, safe drinking water, and improved sanitation. The report further notes that jobs do not translate Nigerians’ hard work into an exit from poverty, as most workers are engaged in small-scale household farm and non-farm enterprises; just 17 percent of Nigerian workers hold the wage jobs best able to lift people out of poverty.
The report adds that climate and conflict shocks – which disproportionately affect Nigeria’s poor – are multiplying, and their effects have been compounded by COVID-19; yet government support for households is scant. Households have adopted dangerous coping strategies, including reducing education and scaling back food consumption, which could have negative long-run consequences for their human capital. These issues affect some parts of Nigeria more than others; the report captures this spatial inequality by providing statistics at the state level, which is crucial given Nigeria’s federal structure.
“It is clear that much needs to be done to help lift millions of Nigerians out of poverty, including boosting health and education, bolstering productive jobs, and expanding social protection” said Shubham Chaudhuri, World Bank Country Director for Nigeria. “Yet implementing pro-poor initiatives requires unlocking fiscal space; reforming expensive subsidies – including fuel subsidies – will be essential, alongside countervailing measures to protect the poor as reforms are effected.”
The report suggests at least three types of deep, long-term reforms to foster and sustain pro-poor growth and raise Nigerians out of poverty. These include: (1) macroeconomic reforms (including fiscal, trade, and exchange rate policy); (2) policies to boost the productivity of farm and non-farm household enterprises; and (3) improving access to electricity, water, and sanitation while bolstering information and communication technologies. These reforms together could help diversify the economy, invigorate structural transformation, create good, productive jobs, and support social protection programs as well as other redistributive government policies. The report emphasizes that these reforms are urgent as Nigeria’s population continues to grow; now is the time to ensure that the country seizes the promise of its young people for economic prosperity. It adds that shaping the specifics of Nigeria’s poverty-reducing policies will depend strongly on redoubling efforts to gather and analyze data regularly.
“Conflict is spreading and intensifying across Nigeria, so it is important to implement programs to support poor and vulnerable Nigerians that are simple and flexible while also limiting the risk of exacerbating fragility and conflict” said Tara Vishwanath, World Bank Lead Economist and co-author of the report. “Data can provide vital guidance on how to design, monitor, and evaluate pro-poor projects and programs, giving a voice to poor and vulnerable Nigerians” added Jonathan Lain, World Bank Economist and co-author of the report.
New official household survey data, due to be collected later in 2022, will provide far more detailed insights into the dynamics of and the key constraints on poverty reduction, as well as new pro-poor policies. By investing in data, Nigeria can build trust, accountability, and transparency, taking substantial strides on its pathway to poverty reduction.
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This study, based on the Keynesian theory of poverty, empirically justifies that unemployment is the root cause of poverty in Nigeria as the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) result showed that unemployment increases poverty both in the short run and long run.
This paper attempts an explanation of the concept of poverty and its theoretical framework, the impact of poverty on Nigerian economic development, causes of poverty in Nigeria and effort made by successive governments to eradicate poverty in the country.
Sluggish growth, low human capital, labor market weaknesses, and exposure to shocks are holding Nigeria’s poverty reduction back says a new World Bank report “A Better Future for All Nigerians: Nigeria Poverty Assessment 2022”.
The paper navigates a pluri-causal trajectory to explain why poverty in Nigeria persists de-spite relative economic growth and decades of implementing poverty alleviation pro-grammes. Several scholars of poverty in Nigeria enumerate corruption, political instability,
Nigeria aspires to lift 100 million people out of poverty by 2030. Yet since 2015, and right through the COVID-19 crisis, population growth outstripped real GDP growth, pushing living standards down. Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis ushered in the deepest recession in Nigeria since the 1980s.
This paper aims to estimate a long-run poverty trend for Nigeria, a country whose poverty trends are crucial for regional and global estimates. In 2020, the Nigerian National Bureau of Sta-tistics released the first oficial poverty estimates for Nigeria in almost a decade, calculated using the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey.
In Nigeria, the nature of the determinants of poverty can be traced to low or declining level of economic growth, income inequalities, unemployment, corruption, bad governance,
Nigeria ranked among the 25 poorest countries of the world which started its independent nationhood with poverty level of barely 15% of its population in 1960. And today, is struggling to bring it down from about 70% of its current teeming population of about 160 million.
This paper describes the nature and evolution of poverty in Nigeria between 1985 and 1992. It highlights the potential wealth of the Nigerian economy and examines how the economic policies pursued in the 1980s and 1990s impacted economic growth and welfare.
Poverty in Nigeria is of the population, different levels of education, different overwhelmingly rural and regional, but is also greatly ages for household heads, and different parts of the influenced by age, education, and the nature of