The National Bureau of Statistics has disclosed that 133 million Nigerians are multidimensionally poor.
In its latest National Multidimensional Poverty Index Report launched on Thursday, the NBS said that 63 per cent of Nigerians are poor due to a lack of access to health, education, and living standards, alongside unemployment and shocks.
The MPI offers a multivariate form of poverty assessment, identifying deprivations across health, education, living standards, work and shocks.
According to the Statistician-General at the NBS, Semiu Adeniran, it is the first time they will conduct a standard multidimensional poverty survey in Nigeria.
The Punch reports him saying: “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 stated 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.
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.”
In its own version, The Guardian reports that Nigeria says 133 million of its citizens are living in poverty
According to the paper, Nigerian government said the figure represents 63 percent of its population living in poverty according to a survey conducted by National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the National Social Safety-Nets Coordinating Office (NASSCO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
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 cleaner energy. High deprivations are also apparent 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 percent, nearly 47 million live in the South.
It identified Sokoto State as having the most poverty levels across states, with 91 percent while Ondo has the lowest with 27 percent.
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 percent.
