UK welcomes Nigeria’s poverty report, urges pro-poor policy

The United Kingdom says it welcomes the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The report, released on Thursday, indicates that 63 per cent or 133 million Nigerians are poor.

In its tweet on Friday, the UK Government, said, “The UK welcomes the @NBS_Nigeria release of the nationwide #MultiDimensionalPovertyIndex in #Nigeria.🇳🇬

“We urge all government and development partners to use the results to inform evidence-based policy and programmes that support the poor. This is a critical tool to #endpoverty.”

The report centered on four components: health, living standard, education, security and unemployment. The NBS had focused on  the number of people living below the US dollar in calculating the MPI.

The survey had, between November 2021 and February 2022, sampled over 56,000 households across the 36 states of the Federation and the FCT. The result states that 65 per cent of the poor – that is 86 million people – live in the North, while 35 per cent – nearly 47 million – live in the South.

The report said, “Over half of the population of Nigeria are multidimensionally poor and cook with dung, wood or charcoal, rather than clean energy. High deprivations are also apparent nationally in sanitation, time to healthcare, food insecurity, and housing.”

Putting a further perspective on it, the report said, “In general, the incidence of monetary poverty is lower than the incidence of multidimensional poverty across most states.”

Equally, the report identified Sokoto state as the poorest in the federation, with 91per cent, while Ondo is the lowest, posting 27 per cent.

Furthermore, the North West, with 45.49m people, has the highest number of poor people, followed by North East with 20.47m; North Central 20.19m; South South 19.66m; South West 16.27m; and South East 10.85m.

On state profile, Kano is said to have 10.51m inhabitants, while Abia with 1.12m is projected as the least populated. Also, the report showed that  two-thirds (67.5 per cent) of children (0–17) are multidimensionally poor, and that half of all poor people are children (51.1 percent).

“Child poverty is prevalent in rural areas, with almost 90% of rural children experiencing poverty. Across the geo-political zones, the child MPI shows higher poverty in the North-East and North-West (where 90% of children are poor) and lower poverty in the South-East and South-West (74% and 65.1% respectively). The incidence of Child MPI is above 50% in all States and greater than 95% in Bayelsa, Sokoto, Gombe and Kebbi.

In Nigeria, 40.1% of people are poor according to the 2018/19 national monetary poverty line, and 63% are multidimensionally poor according to the National MPI 2022.”