The World Bank has projected that the number of poor people in Nigeria will increase by 20 million by 2022.
Gloria Joseph-Raji, World Bank senior economist, was speaking on Tuesday, at the launch of a 2021 macroeconomic outlook report by the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG). Quoting the monthly COVID-19 impact survey carried out by the National Bureau of Statistics, Joseph-Raji, said most households have remained in an economically precarious situation despite the pick up in economic activities after the lockdown was lifted.
A 2020 report released by the NBS showed that 82.9 million Nigerians were living in poverty in 2019. “The pace of recovery is highly uncertain.
We actually consider Nigeria right now to be at a critical junction in the sense that the achievement of its development goal of lifting 100 million people out of poverty by 2030 was already challenging even before COVID-19 struck, and then COVID-19 has made this even more challenging and more urgent.
So, with slower growth and fewer jobs, and then coupled with high inflation, our estimates are that the number of the poor will increase by about 15 to 20 million people by 2022 from the about 83 million people in 2019. And the 2019 numbers are from the Nigeria Living Standards Survey of 2018/2019,” she said.
