Four in ten Nigerians or over 82.9 million Nigerians live in poverty according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its latest Poverty and Inequality report which defines national poverty as annual expenditure below N137,430 (N376.5 per day or roughly $1 on 360/$).
This is lower than a 62.6% poverty rate reported by NBS in 2010 using per capita approach.
In 2019, poverty headcount at 52.1% was higher in rural areas than urban where it stood at 18%, said NBS.
Sokoto (87.73%), Taraba (87.72%), and Jigawa (87.02%) had the highest poverty rate, while Lagos (4.5%), Delta (6%) and Osun (8.5%) had the least.
The report, made in collaboration with the World Bank, also put poverty gap or depth of poverty at 12.9%, meaning the poor people on the average live around N18,000. less than the minimum consumption required to be classified as poor.
Also inequality measure stood at 35.1 on a national scale (100 means perfect inequality of expenditure distribution while 0 means perfect equality).
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On account of insurgency in the state, Borno was omitted from the report due to inability to gather sufficient data.
According to the NBS, the Nigerian Living Standards Survey (NLSS) is the official survey that is the basis for measuring poverty and living standards.
“Between September of 2018 and October of 2019, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) conducted the latest round of the NLSS after a decade. It is representative at the state level with a sample size of 22,110 households,” it said.
The World Poverty Clock’s current estimate is 1 in 2 Nigerians (102.4 million people) living in extreme poverty, another dimension for measuring poverty, based on $1.9 a day.
