JUST IN: NBS says 133m Nigerians now live in poverty

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has revealed that 133 million Nigerians live in poverty on multiple fronts.

The NBS stated in its most recent National Multidimensional Poverty Index Report, released on Thursday, stating that 63% of Nigerians live in poverty as a result of insufficient access to health, education, and living standards, as well as unemployment and shocks.

The MPI provides a multivariate method of assessing poverty that identifies deprivations in areas such as health, education, living conditions, employment, and shocks.

Semiu Adeniran, the NBS’s general statistician, claimed that this would be the country’s first multidimensional standard poverty survey.

The survey was implemented in 2021 to 2022 and it is the largest survey with a sample size of over 56,610 people in 109 senatorial districts in the 36 states of Nigeria.

The United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Matthias Schmale, who revealed the findings from the report said 63 per cent of Nigerians are multidimensionally poor meaning that they are being derived in more than one dimension of the four measured.

Read also:Nigerians spend N9.5trn monthly on living expenses —NBS

He said; “Multidimensional poverty is more pronounced in rural areas where 72 per cent of people are poor compared to urban areas where we have 42 per cent.

“Gender disparity continues to affect the population with one in seven poor people living in a household in which a man has completed high school but the woman has not.”

According to a World Bank report, the number of poor persons in Nigeria will rise to 95.1 million in 2022. The number of poor people was 89 million in 2020. This means that 6.1 million more persons would have fallen beneath the poverty line between 2020 and 2022, a 6.7 percent increase.

With the projected 2022 figures, the number of poor persons in Nigeria has had a four-year increase of 14.7 percent from the 2018/19 figure of 82.1 million to the projected 95.1 million in 2022. It was stated that the poverty rate had been aided by the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and the growing population.

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