Nigeria’s Poverty Surge

Nigeria added 17.9 million people to the ranks of the multidimensionally poor between 2021 and 2024, the largest absolute increase recorded anywhere in the world. Afghanistan, in second place, added 5.3 million. That is the finding at the centre of the 2026 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, published by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. It should decisively end any comfortable talk about reform.

The poverty rate climbed from 33 per cent to 38.7 per cent in three years, and the number of poor Nigerians from 72.21 million to 90.07 million. A country that was making progress between 2018 and 2021 has gone into reverse.

The index does not measure income. It tracks overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards, using 10 indicators that include nutrition, child mortality, schooling, electricity, water, sanitation and housing.

A person counts as poor when deprived in at least one-third of the weighted indicators. That is why the measure matters. A family can find the money for a day’s meal and still live without power, without clean water and far from a school. A separate 2024 estimate, built on the latest survey without adjustment for comparison over time, puts the figure at 113.32 million people, or 48.7 per cent of the population. The report says the two estimates use different methods and are not interchangeable, and we do not treat them as such. Neither makes comfortable reading.

The geography is stark. Kebbi, Yobe and Sokoto recorded the highest levels of poverty, followed by Jigawa, Zamfara, Gombe, Borno and Bauchi. Lagos recorded the lowest, with Edo and Rivers also among the states nearest the bottom of the ranking. Across the federation, the share of people living in poverty runs from 3.7 per cent to 88.3 per cent. Put plainly, a Nigerian’s chance of living in deprivation depends heavily on the state where he lives. We have said on this page before that a federation which tolerates such a gap is not governing itself as one country. Eight northern states carry the heaviest load, and the report finds that hardship is increasingly concentrated there.

The authors add a point that policymakers cannot afford to ignore: states with similar poverty levels face different problems. In Yobe, poor nutrition and child mortality contribute more to the total. In Sokoto, the lack of water and electricity weighs more heavily. A single national formula cannot answer both. Yet federal programmes too often arrive as one template, drawn in Abuja and judged by how many beneficiaries were counted. A state that needs clinics and feeding centres receives the same package as one that needs boreholes and power lines. The report calls for tailor-made policies, and we agree. Planning of that kind needs honest local data, which this country has been slow to gather and slower to publish.

Living standards account for 40.6 per cent of Nigeria’s poverty value, ahead of education at 30.6 per cent and health at 28.8 per cent. About 37.6 per cent of Nigerians lack clean cooking fuel and 31.3 per cent have no electricity. Another 28.5 per cent live in inadequate housing. These are failures of infrastructure that no household can fix with its own savings. Successive administrations have promised stable power and affordable homes, and the figures show how much of the promise is still on paper. A mother who cooks over firewood in a dark room has little reason to believe the next budget speech.

Responsibility is shared, and it should be named. The Federal Government sets the economic climate in which three years of rising poverty occurred, and it cannot disown the result. State governors control much of the spending on schools, clinics and water schemes, and in the poorest states the gap between announcement and delivery is wide. Local governments sit closest to the people and hold the least money. Several of the states at the top of the ranking, among them Zamfara and Borno, are also those where insecurity has emptied farms and closed schools. Poverty and violence feed each other, and a plan that treats them separately will fail at both.

The global picture offers no consolation. About 1.2 billion people across 108 countries live in acute multidimensional poverty, and Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 616 million of them, more than half the total. Children make up 617 million of the world’s poor. Nigeria is one of only five countries where poverty rose in the latest period, alongside Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Guinea and Kyrgyzstan. A country of Nigeria’s size and resources should not be found in that company. Africa’s most populous nation cannot lead the continent while its own households slide backwards.

There is a way out, and the report points to it. Thirty-three countries have halved their multidimensional poverty values in under 15 years, six of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Rapid progress remains possible where policy is targeted and sustained. Nigeria has done it before, in the years to 2021, and it has the wealth and the people to do it again. What it has lacked is the discipline to measure honestly, spend where the need is greatest and accept the consequences when results disappoint.

We therefore urge the Federal Government and the governors of the eight worst-affected states to adopt the index as a working tool. Each state should set targets for the specific deprivations the report identifies and publish progress every year. Federal transfers and intervention funds should follow the pattern of need, with the poorest states first in line. The National Assembly should ask for annual reports on how money was spent against these targets, and the press and civil society should check them. Where a state falls short, it should say why in plain language and say what it will change.

Nigeria has the report in hand. What it lacks is a plan with state names on it and dates beside them.