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95.1m Nigerians to slip into extreme poverty by end of 2022, World Bank predicts

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95.1m Nigerians to slip into extreme poverty by end of 2022, World Bank predicts

The World Bank has predicted that by the end of 2022, around 95.1 million Nigerians will slip into the extreme poverty line due to the stagnation of the country’s economy, occasioned by poor policies of the government.

In a report published on Tuesday entitled ‘A Better Future for All Nigerians: 2022 Nigeria Poverty Assessment,’ the World Bank said the Nigerian economy has been stagnated since 2015 when the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari came into power.

The Washington-based bank said according to several surveys it conducted since 2015, “poverty reduction in Nigeria appears to have stalled in the last decade.”

“Poverty reduction in Nigeria appears to have stalled in the last decade, especially since 2015, according to both back-casting and survey-to-survey imputation techniques,” the report said.

“The best estimates from the back-casting approach suggest that the poverty headcount rate—at the international poverty line—was 42.8 percent in 2010.

“What this means is that going by that back-cast surveyd, about 95.1 million Nigerians are expected to be poor by 2022.

“Since the back-casts provide yearly estimates, they also suggest that poverty may have started declining in the first part of the 2010s, but that this trend halted and then reversed around 2015.

“This is unsurprising—and indeed is hardwired into the back-casting model through real GDP growth estimates—given the 2016 recession, brought about by weakening oil prices.”

Read also: 90 million Nigerians now live in extreme poverty —Economists

The World Bank report further revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic had pushed over five million more Nigerians into poverty by 2022, which is also a contributing factor to the poverty situation in the country.

“The COVID-19 crisis is driving up Nigeria’s poverty rate, pushing more than 5 million additional people into poverty by 2022.

“With real per capita GDP growth being negative in all sectors in 2020, poverty is projected to have deepened for the current poor, while those households that were just above the poverty line prior to the COVID-19 crisis would be likely to fall into poverty.

“Given the effects of the crisis, however, the poverty headcount rate is instead projected to jump from 40.1 per cent in 2018/19 to 42.0 per cent in 2020 and 42.6 per cent in 2022, implying that the number of poor people was 89.0 million in 2020 and would be 95.1 million in 2022.

“Taking the difference between these two scenarios, the crisis alone is projected to have driven an additional 3.8 million Nigerians into poverty in 2020, with an additional 5.1 million living in poverty by 2022,” the World Bank report revealed.

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