Approximately 75.5% of rural Nigerians now live below the poverty line, highlighting escalating hardship in the country’s interior regions, according to the World Bank.
This revelation comes from the Bank’s April 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief on Nigeria, which presents a bleak assessment of deepening economic hardship, growing inequality, and ongoing underdevelopment nationwide.
The report emphasized that rural areas are particularly affected, with economic stagnation, rising inflation, and insecurity worsening living conditions—even as poverty remains prevalent in urban areas as well.
According to the report, “Based on the most recent official household survey data from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, 30.9 per cent of Nigerians lived below the international extreme poverty line of $2.15 per person per day in 2018/19 before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The report further highlighted persistent regional inequalities in Nigeria, revealing that as of 2018/19, the poverty rate stood at 46.5% in northern geopolitical zones, compared to just 13.5% in the south. Inequality, measured by the Gini index, was reported at 35.1 during the same period.
It also introduced the concept of Nigeria’s “Prosperity Gap” — the multiplier needed to raise individual incomes to a daily standard of $25 — estimated at 10.2, a figure higher than most peer countries. Despite multiple policy efforts, this gap underscores the deep and persistent economic divide nationwide.
The demographic breakdown showed that children aged 0–14 had a staggering poverty rate of 72.5%, highlighting the extent of deprivation among Nigeria’s youngest. Education was found to be a major poverty determinant: 79.5% of Nigerians without formal education live in poverty, compared to 61.9% with primary education, 50.0% with secondary, and only 25.4% of those with tertiary education.
The report also spotlighted multidimensional poverty indicators: 30.9% of Nigerians live on less than $2.15 per day; 32.6% lack access to basic drinking water; 45.1% are without adequate sanitation; and 39.4% have no access to electricity. Education access remains a major concern, with 17.6% of adults not having completed primary school and 9.0% of households reporting at least one out-of-school child.
It observed that progress in reducing extreme poverty had nearly stalled even before the COVID-19 pandemic, with poverty declining by just 0.5 percentage points annually since 2010. The situation remains bleak for the urban poor, whose living conditions show minimal improvement amid a scarcity of poverty-reducing job opportunities.
While the World Bank acknowledged recent reform efforts aimed at stabilizing the macroeconomic environment, it warned that high inflation continues to erode household purchasing power, especially in urban areas where incomes lag behind rising prices.
The Bank called for immediate policy measures to protect vulnerable populations from inflation shocks and to promote job creation through more productive economic activities.
