The United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA) has called on the federal government to invest in healthcare and education if it does not want 250 million Nigerians to become poor in the coming years.
UNFPA Country Representative, Ms Ulla Mueller, said this in Abuja on Monday, Nov. 21, at a parliamentary summit to fast-track Nigeria’s demographic transition.
She said: “The imperative we have is to take action now, in a world of 8 billion people, in a country that in a very few years will be the third most populous in the world, there could be 250 million people that could feel a sense of opportunities and possibilities, but with the wrong investment, there could be 250 million people living in increased poverty and increased insecurity.
“We have to record this. To do that without family planning, there’ll be no universal health and demographic transition.”
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports that The number of Nigerians living in poverty stands at over 133 million, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had recently announced.
It said the figure represents 63 percent of the nation’s population. The NBS disclosed this in its “Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index” released on Thursday.
According to the report, over half of the population who are poor cook with dung, wood or charcoal, rather than cleaner energy.
It said high deprivations are also apparent in sanitation, time to healthcare, food insecurity, and housing.
The report noted that multidimensional poverty is higher in rural areas, where 72 percent of people are poor, compared to 42 percent of people in urban areas.
Approximately, the bureau said, 70 percent of Nigeria’s population live in rural areas, yet these areas are home to 80 percent of poor people.
The report, the first poverty index survey published by the statistics bureau since 2010, said that 65 percent of the poor (86 million people) live in the North, while 35 percent (nearly 47 million) live in the South.
“Poverty levels across states vary significantly, with the incidence of multidimensional poverty ranging from a low of 27 percent in Ondo to a high of 91 percent in Sokoto,” it said.
Similarly, the report said the poorest States are Sokoto, Bayelsa, Jigawa, Kebbi, Gombe and Yobe, but we could not say for sure which of these is the poorest, because their confidence intervals overlap.
In general, the NBS said the incidence of monetary poverty is lower than the incidence of multidimensional poverty across most states.
“In Nigeria, 40.1 percent of people were poor, based on the 2018/19 national monetary poverty line, and 63 percent are multidimensionally poor according to the National MPI 2022,” it said.
