133 Million Nigerians Living in Poverty – NBS

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) says 133 million Nigerians are multidimensionally poor.

Multidimensional poverty encompasses deprivations experienced by poor people — such as poor health, lack of education, inadequate living standards, and living in environmentally hazardous areas, among others.

NBS said this in its latest National Multidimensional Poverty Index, MPI, Report launched on Thursday.

According to the report, 63 per cent of Nigerians are poor due to a lack of access to health, education, and living standards, alongside unemployment and shocks.

Nigeria’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Survey was launched in Abuja on Thursday with President Muhammadu Buhari represented by his chief of staff Prof. Ibrahim Gambari.

Buhari said the index was adopted because it provides ways poverty could be identified and addressed with government policies.

The indices used to calculate the poverty line in Nigeria were based on Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) with five components of health, living standard, education, security and unemployment.

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 also appeared nationally in sanitation, time to healthcare, food insecurity, and housing.”

“In general, the incidence of monetary poverty is lower than the incidence of multidimensional poverty across most states. 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.”

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

It identified Sokoto State as having the most poverty levels across states, with 91 per cent while Ondo has the lowest with 27 per cent.

The report was released days after the NBS disclosed that Nigeria’s inflation stands at 21.09% from October 2022.

The latest figure shows that the general price level for the headline inflation rate increased in October 2022 when compared to the same month in the preceding year (October 2021) by 5.09 per cent.