Half of the world’s 736 million extremely poor people live in Nigeria, India, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh, according to a World Bank report entitled ‘Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle’.
The report shows that 368 million extremely poor people live in these countries, stating that by 2030, the share of the extremely poor living in sub-Saharan Africa could be as large as 87 percent on the basis of historical growth rates.
The report explains that extreme poverty rate is significantly lower in India relative to the average rate in Sub-Saharan Africa, but because of its large population, India’s total number of poor is still large.
“In a sign of change, however, forecasts for 2018 suggest that India’s status as the country with the most poor is ending—Nigeria either already is, or soon will be, the country with the most poor people,” it says.
“Extreme poverty is increasingly becoming a sub-Saharan African problem.”
“ Sub-Saharan African countries have struggled partly because of their high reliance on extractive industries that have weaker ties to the consumption and income levels of the poor, the prevalence of conflict, and their vulnerability to natural disasters such as droughts,” the report adds.
The World Bank measures extreme poverty defined by the number of people living below an income or consumption of $.1.90 a day.
“Back in 1990, 36 percent of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty, defined by the IPL as consumption (or income) less than US$1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP). By 2015, that share had plunged to 10 percent, down from 11.2 percent in 2013. The number of people living in extreme pov-erty stood at 736 million in 2015, down from nearly 2 billion in 1990,” the bank says.
An earlier report by Brookings Institute in 2018 had adjudged Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world, with 87 million extremely poor people and 8,000 people sliding into extreme poverty on a daily basis.
Poverty has worsened in the last three years, with unemployment rising from 9.7 percent in 2014 to 23 percent in the third quarter of 2018. The economy went into recession in the second quarter of 2016, and though the country has exited it, inflation has been mainly double-digit, standing at 11.4 percent in December 2018.
The World Bank used indicators such as income, education, access to basic electricity, health and nutrition as well as security in arriving at its analysis. Nigeria scored low in these areas, which is a wake-up call for leaders and voters as elections beckon.
ODINAKA ANUDU
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
