No fewer than 82.9 million Nigerians are currently living in poverty, National Bureau of Statistics said in a 2019 Poverty & Inequality in Nigeria report release on Monday.
This figure represents 40.09% of the total population and excludes Borno which has been ravaged by Boko Haram insurgents.
According to the report, poverty in the urban is 18.04% while the rural areas across the country have 52.1% of their dwellers living below poverty line.
The worst hit states are Sokoto and Taraba states — at 87.7 percent poverty — as they lead in terms of percentage of people living in poverty, while Lagos and Delta have the lowest numbers at 4.5 and six percent respectively.
With this, it means the country has produced more people living in poverty compared to the last poverty data released by the NBS in 2010 when 62.6% of the population (102.2 million) was living in poverty.
The NBS, alongside the World Bank, used the Nigerian living standards survey (NLSS) to measure poverty and living standards between September of 2018 and October of 2019.
The NLSS measured poverty using the consumption expenditure rather than income.
“The consumption aggregate is the monetary value of food and non-food goods and services consumed by the household,” the report read.
“Thus, the consumption aggregate has the following component: expenditure on food from all sources, schooling and education expenditure, healthcare expenditure, housing expenditure, non-food expenditure like clothing and recreation.”
In June 2018, Brookings Institution said Nigeria has overtaken India as the poverty capital of the world.
The institution had estimated that the number of Nigerians in extreme poverty increases by six people every minute. (The Cable)
