6 Nigerians Become Poor Per Minute, Says Report

BY DAMOLA EMMANUEL

With six people becoming poor every minute, and a staggering 87million living in extreme poverty, Nigeria has upstaged India as the country with the biggest population of poor people in the world.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, says the report, is poised to take the second position. And by the end of 2018, Africa, as a whole, would have added 3.2 million more people to those living in extreme poverty than there are now.

“Already,” continues the report, “Africans account for about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor. If current trends persist, they will account for nine-tenths by 2030. Fourteen out of 18 countries in the world—where the number of extreme poor is rising—are in Africa.”

Certainly, this poverty report is one credential the Buhari Administration could ill-afford as the 2019 glides closer. It would be a bitter pill for the President and his party, the All Progressives Congress, APC, to swallow as they crisscross the country, touting their achievements before the electorate.

The unsavoury news was released recently via a report by the Brookings Institution which drew data from the World Poverty Clock. The report was authored by three people-Homi Kharas, Interim Vice President and Director of Global Economy and Development, Kristofer Hamel, Chief Operating Officer of World Data Lab, and Martin Hofer, a research analyst with World Data Lab.

The World Poverty Clock is a tool created by the Vienna-based non-governmental organisation, World Data Lab; and it is designed to monitor progress against poverty globally, and regionally; providing real-time poverty data across countries. In its recent research, poverty trajectories were computed for 188 countries and territories across the globe, both developed and developing.

In the report published by Brookings in its website, on June 19, 2018, the authors said: “At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India continues to fall.”

However, this scary statistics is a far cry from the projection made by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2016, which declared that at least 112 million Nigerians were living below the poverty line

Aside the issue of spiralling poverty, the authors also reported on the sustainable development goals, SDG, declaring that it was becoming increasingly difficult to achieve them.

“Between January 1, 2016—when implementation of internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) started—and July 2018, the world has seen about 83 million people escape extreme poverty. But if extreme poverty were to fall to zero by 2030, we should have already reduced the number by about 120 million, just assuming a linear trajectory. To get rid of this backlog of some 35 million people, we now have to rapidly step up the pace.

“This notwithstanding, the fundamental dynamics of global extreme poverty reduction are clear. Given a starting point of about 725 million people in extreme poverty at the beginning of 2016, we needed to reduce poverty by 1.5 people every second to achieve the goal and yet we’ve been moving at a pace of only 1.1 people per second. Given that we’ve fallen behind so much, the new target rate has just increased to 1.6 people per second through 2030. At the same time, because so many countries are falling behind, the actual pace of poverty reduction is starting to slow down. Our projections show that by 2020, the pace could fall to 0.9 people per second, and to 0.5 people per second by 2022.

“As we fall further behind the target pace, the task of ending extreme poverty by 2030 is becoming inexorably harder because we are running out of time. We should celebrate our achievements, but increasingly sound the alarm that not enough is being done, especially in Africa.”

According to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, the World Poverty Clock  “uses publicly available data on income distribution, production, and consumption, provided by various international organizations, most notably the UN, WorldBank, and the International Monetary Fund. These organizations compile data provided to them by governments in each country. In a few cases, governments fail to provide data. The World Poverty Clock uses models to estimate poverty in these countries, covering 99.7% of the world’s population. It also models how individual incomes might change over time, using IMF growth forecasts for the medium-term complemented by long-term “shared socio-economic pathways” developed by the Institute of International Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna, Austria, and similar analysis developed by the OECD.”

The World Poverty Clock data are updated each April and October “to take into account new household surveys and new projections on country economic growth from the International Monetary Funds’ World Economic Outlook.”