Climate-related shocks pose as an additional risk to households just above poverty line
Around five million people in Nigeria who were just above the poverty line before the COVID-19 pandemic may be pushed into poverty by the end of 2022, a new report projected.
The number of poor people in the country is set to rise to 95.1 million in 2022, the World Bank report stated.Without the pandemic, the figure would have been 90 million in 2022, it stated.
A large part of the growth will be due to natural population increase, the international financial institution noted. The COVID-19 crisis alone is projected to have driven an additional 3.8 million Nigerians into poverty in 2020 and an additional 5.1 million by 2022, the report added.
In Nigeria, 4 in 10 people were living in poverty, just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
Nigeria has the highest number of people living below the poverty line among African countries, according to the World Poverty Clock. It is followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo with around 67 million poor citizens, Madagascar with over 21 million and Angola with around 18 million.
A Better Future for All Nigerians: Nigeria Poverty Assessment 2022 brings in deeper analysis on the relationship between the labour market and poverty, climate shocks and the role of social protection in poverty reduction.
The report draws primarily on the 2018-19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey, which provided Nigeria’s first official poverty numbers in almost a decade.
The researchers also referred to the Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey.
NLPS was collected monthly between April 2020 and April 2021. These surveys were implemented by Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), in collaboration with the World Bank.
Jobs do not translate Nigerians’ hard work into an exit from poverty, the new report said. This is because most workers are engaged in small-scale household farms and non-farm enterprises, it added.
Just 17 per cent Nigerian workers hold wage jobs that are best able to lift people out of poverty, according to the report.
Women earn less than men across job types, the researchers observed. This is in part because they lack access to key inputs, especially for agriculture.
Addressing gender inequality in the labor market can improve overall productivity which will help to drive down poverty, the report noted.
Climate-related shocks, such as floods and droughts, threaten the rain-fed agricultural and pastoral activities that are common among households living below or just above the poverty line, the report stated, adding:
Around 21.5 per cent Nigerians lived in a household affected by at least one climatic shock, such as loss of harvest or property due to fire, poor rains or flooding.
The report said: 64.3 per cent Nigerians lived in a household that had been affected by at least one non-climatic shock like theft, death or illness of a household member or sudden price increases.
The World Bank Group has urged three types of deep structural reforms to foster and sustain pro-poor growth and to lift millions of Nigerians out of poverty. These include:
These reforms are urgent as Nigeria’s population is growing, the report highlighted.
Better social protection will speed poverty reduction and boost crisis resilience, it added. Between March 2020 and March 2021, just 3.9 per cent households had received support from social safety net programmes in the form of direct cash transfers from federal, state or local governments.
Resources for social protection have to be carefully directed towards those most in need, since Nigeria is fiscally constrained, according to the report.
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