Why do 133 million Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty?

One hundred and thirty-three million Nigerians are multidimensionally poor—over 60% of our population. 

This was one of the takeaways from the National Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report recently launched by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). According to the report, 133 million Nigerians are deprived of more than one essential survival need (good health, good living standards, basic education, and gainful employment). 

Even so, it's not news that many Nigerians are poor. Sometime in 2018, Nigeria was said to have surpassed India as the poverty capital of the World, with 87 million people living below the poverty line. 

Still, the fact that two out of three Nigerians are poor is quite sobering. 

The index, currently the country's most extensive database on poverty, shows how many Nigerians are deprived of basic needs. The data is collected and reported across all states and senatorial districts in Nigeria. It is also publicly available as reports and on an interactive data site by the NBS.  

This article will make sense of some key findings from the index. Specifically, we'll look at why Nigerians are multidimensionally poor because insights like this are critical to Nigerians as we head out to the polls in 2023. 

Before digging our teeth into the data, we'll start by looking at how the index defines poverty to make sense of the data we'll share later.

Poor on all fronts 

The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures poverty as deprivation from necessities like food, healthcare, education and a reasonable standard of living. Therefore, the index measures poverty beyond monetary measures. 

In the past, the NBS has measured poverty by the number of households living below ₦137,430 per year or ₦11,450 per month—just enough to meet their basic needs.

The MPI takes a different approach by telling us the extent of this deprivation and indicating how likely a person can access basic survival needs. 

You see, it's not enough for people to lack money. Even when people have just enough money to make it above the poverty line, they are still poor if they don't have the basic needs to live a healthy and decent life. 

For the MPI, the NBS adopted the Alkire-Foster (AF) method of multidimensional poverty, which measures deprivation across fifteen metrics under four key areas: health, education, the standard of living and employment (work and shocks). The AF calculates the MPI by first taking the headcount of the people who lack these basic needs, then the average percentage of indicators in which poor people are deprived. 

To calculate the MPI, we first measure how many people lack access to at least two of the above metrics—the incidence of poverty. Then, we calculate the average number of indicators people in each state lack—to show the intensity of their deprivation. The MPI usually has a value from 0 to 1, with one indicating the most deprived Nigerians per state or country-wide.

According to the AF method, people are multidimensionally poor if they lack access to timely healthcare, essential nutrients for good health, basic education, gainful employment, and adequate security. The metrics are highlighted on the index website. 

Essentially, a person is poor if they are deprived of one or more indicators highlighted here.  

The NBS MPI (using the AF method) as a poverty measure is more robust than the World Bank’s MPI, which is similar but measures poverty across all countries globally. While the World Bank’s MPI uses just six indicators, the NBS uses fifteen. The additional indicators include food insecurity, water reliability, underemployment, security shocks, school lag and child deprivations. 

So, it’s not surprising that the World Bank’s MPI (last updated in 2018) records that only 42% of Nigerians are multidimensionally poor. 

To calculate the index, the NBS sent out surveys to over 56,000 households across all states and senatorial districts—i.e. conducted 1,530 surveys across every state between November 2021 and February 2022. While this is commendable as it covers all the people in various parts of the country, the index attaches weights to each segment using their population to reflect the population differences between each state and senatorial region.

We’ve broken down the index’s methodology, but to make sense of the data, we'll take a top-down approach by first looking at the data from a macro level and then drilling into specific insights. 

First, how are 133 million Nigerians multidimensionally poor?
 

133 million Nigerians 

The first data point, and one of the most devastating, is that 133 million Nigerians are deprived of more than one of the fifteen indicators below. This is compared to the 93 million Nigerians that are poor only in monetary terms—i.e. they earn below the poverty line of ₦11,450 per month.

From the above chart, we can see that the top areas where Nigerians are deprived are: access to clean cooking fuels, clean and single-use sanitation facilities, proximity to healthcare facilities, adequate food and basic housing materials for shelter. These areas fall under food, health, and well-being. 

First, more than half of Nigeria's poor do not have access to clean energy sources as they typically use charcoal or animal faeces for cooking. This poses significant health challenges, and according to Mckinsey, 600,000 people die annually from exposure to fumes from biomass fuels like charcoal. 

Also, two out of every five multidimensionally poor people suffer from poor sanitary conditions. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reports that poor access to clean water and good hygiene is one of the primary causes of high mortality among Nigeria’s children. 

Furthermore, it becomes challenging when such children need adequate and timely healthcare, the third issue in the chart above. Nigeria currently has less than 40,000 hospitals for its 200 million people, i.e. only 17 hospitals for every 100,000 people.

Finally, 40% of the multidimensionally poor were deprived of basic housing requirements needed to shield them from adverse weather conditions. In the most recent LSMS survey, 40% of Nigerians still live in buildings with mud walls which winds and floods can quickly destroy. 

However, the overarching point here is that deprivation among Nigeria’s poor restricts them from a better life and moves them closer to death. 

The second critical insight from the index is the location of Nigeria’s poor.
 

Where does Nigeria's poor reside?

Drilling deeper into the country's regions with a massive concentration of the poor is critical to know how best to help them out of poverty. So, where do most of Nigeria's poor live? 

The map above shows that although multidimensional poverty is distributed across the country, it’s more prevalent in the North than in the South. The most deprived states, however, are Sokoto, Bayelsa, Jigawa and Kebbi—in the North West, North East and South-South.  

On the other hand, the South-West—which has the lowest poverty headcount, also has the least proportion of multidimensionally poor people. The exception, however, is Ogun state, with 68% of its population deprived. 

But remember that MPI is a combination of the incidence of multidimensional poverty (multidimensionally poor population in a state) and intensity (the extent of deprivation in the state). Let’s start with the incidence. 

The map above shows the percentage of the multidimensionally poor population in each state and reflects the previous map. Sokoto, Bayelsa, Jigawa, Yobe and Gombe have a considerable proportion of their population deprived of basic needs for sustenance. 90% of the people living in Sokoto state lack at least one of the requirements for sustenance. 

Again, all the states in the South West, bar Ogun, have relatively low incidence rates. 

The other aspect of the MPI, intensity, measures the average deprivation percentage across the states.

Using this metric, the results change quite a bit. Kebbi, which didn’t have the highest proportion of its population deprived, is more intensely deprived than Sokoto. Basically, 90% of people living in Sokoto are deprived of about 45% of the indicators, whereas 82% of Kebbi residents are deprived of 47% of the indicators.  So, even though fewer people live in poverty in Kebbi than in Sokoto, they’re worse off than those in Sokoto.

The intensity also shows that other states in the North West and North Central, like Kaduna, Plateau and Jigawa, which had high incidence rates, have much lower intensity rates. 

But, the South West’s deprivation remains relatively low (the most intense being in Ogun state) while the incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty remain high in Bayelsa. 89% of the people in Bayelsa suffer from deprivation in about 45% of the indicators. 

Now that we’ve gone through the rather dispiriting insights on the spread of multidimensional poverty across the country, the next step is to look at the cause of the poverty—as a way of proffering solutions. 
 

Why are Nigerians poor?

One of the critical benefits of measuring deprivation is knowing why people are poor and how to help them. 

People are often deprived of basic needs because they either earn too little to afford them or live too far from where these needs are accessible. For example, someone might need to earn more to get nutritious food, while someone else might live too far from a suitable primary healthcare facility to access adequate healthcare services.

We must start with the cause of deprivation in the most deprived states to determine if residents are deprived because they don’t earn enough or lack access to basic needs.

The first thing you notice from the table above is that the states in the North (Sokoto, Jigawa, Yobe and Gombe) have similar deprivations, whereas Bayelsa (a Southern state) is slightly different. 

In the north, the top four issues are school attendance, nutrition, time to healthcare and food insecurity. However, people in Bayelsa suffer from food insecurity, unemployment and security shocks, indicating that Bayelsa is an outlier.

Nevertheless, why do people in these states lack access to basic needs? We mentioned lack of access and income as the primary reasons for deprivation, but we’ll focus on income for this article. 

Show me the money 

We could have used the poverty headcount data in the chart above, which shows households earning below ₦11,450 per month, but it wouldn’t be an accurate comparison with the MPI. You see, the poverty headcount data was estimated in 2019 (and published in 2020). Therefore, some of the deprivation recorded in the current MPI (which was recorded in 2021 and early 2022) could be a ripple effect of the Covid-19 pandemic and increased inflation over the past few years. 

Instead, we’ll use employment as a proxy using the last available employment data (from Q4 2020) to understand how income affects access to basic needs. 

There are two types of employment: full employment (work at least 40 hours weekly) and underemployment (less than 40 hours weekly).  The map above shows us people who are both fully employed and underemployed, i.e. all the people who earn incomes from working. 

But it’s not enough to have a job; the quality of work determines how much income a person can earn. So, it’s worth focusing solely on fully-employed Nigerians. 

The chart above shows that two deprived states with ultra-high employment rates are Sokoto and Ogun. Jigawa and Yobe have some of the lowest employment rates, while Bayelsa and Gombe are in between. Sokoto and Ogun may have very low-quality jobs, while Jigawa and Yobe may have more underemployed people. In contrast, Bayelsa and Gombe may have high underemployment and low-quality full-time jobs. 

The issue of low-quality full-time jobs is a phenomenon called in-work poverty. People are employed, but their jobs are insufficient to get them out of poverty. Unfortunately, the MPI doesn’t capture the quality of jobs because the metric used to measure employment is the number of working hours. So, you have people working 40+ hours in bullshit jobs that pay a meagre sum classified as fully employed people. 

So what’s the way out for Nigeria’s most deprived?

To recap, 133 million poor Nigerians today are deprived of accessing their basic needs, and the government’s role in lifting them out of poverty cannot be overemphasised.  Thanks to the MPI, we know precisely what Nigerians in different states need, and the government can step in.

For instance, the root of Bayelsa’s deprivation is food insecurity, unemployment and security shocks. In a previous article, we recorded how oil-related tension in the Niger Delta is one of the reasons for insecurity in the region. So, it’s not surprising that an oil-producing state like Bayelsa is vulnerable to security shocks.

Therefore, the role of the government in Bayelsa is to provide adequate security to the region. Also, poor access to basic needs could be improved by increasing healthcare infrastructure, which makes healthcare within reach. Furthermore, getting people out of poverty requires getting them engaged in good work. It's not enough for people to work; they must be engaged in work that improves their income and well-being. Only then will they be able to escape poverty and deprivation sustainably. 

Today, two out of three Nigerians are deprived of critical life necessities, and their survival is threatened daily.