THE World Bank has said that poverty reduction stagnated since 2015, with more Nigerians falling below the poverty line over the years.
The President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), was first elected into the office of president of Nigeria in 2015.
According to the Washington-based bank, the number of poor Nigerians is projected to hit 95.1 million in 2022.
It said this in its report titled, ‘A Better Future for All Nigerians: 2022 Nigeria Poverty Assessment’.
The report read in part, “Poverty reduction had stagnated since 2015.”
It added, “Poverty reduction in Nigeria appears to have stalled in the last decade, according to both back-casting and survey-to-survey imputation techniques. 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. This is only slightly below the analogous estimate from imputing into the 2010/11 GHS, 43.5 percent. With poverty dropping by at most a few percentage points over the last decade, the absolute number of poor people is likely to have climbed, given Nigeria’s rapid population growth.
“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.”
