Achieving Poverty Reduction in Nigeria

The World Bank’s 2020 Human Capital Index report, which was based on a range of markers of health and education including infant mortality, further exposes the rising rate of poverty in Nigeria, writes Ugo Aliogo

Human capital development plays an important role in promoting productivity growth, lowering poverty rates, and sustaining economic growth. Achieving Nigeria’s goals for poverty reduction depends on building human capital. Nigeria has made some socioeconomic progress recently, but the World Bank’s 2020 Human Capital Index puts the country at 150 out of 157 in terms of human capital development.

The country continues to face huge developmental challenges, including the need to reduce the dependency on crude oil and diversify the economy, address insufficient infrastructure, build strong and effective institutions, as well as address governance issues and public financial management systems.

Inequality, in terms of income and opportunities, remains high and has negatively affected poverty reduction. The lack of job opportunities is at the core of the high poverty levels, regional inequality, and social and political unrest. High inflation has also taken a toll on household’s welfare and high prices in 2020-2022 are likely to have pushed an additional 8 million Nigerians into poverty.

The World Bank stated this in a report titled, ‘COVID-19 and Nigeria’s human capital crisis’, where it noted that Nigeria’s ambitious poverty-reduction targets hinge on developing human capital.

According to the report, learning poverty which captures 10-year-olds’ ability to understand simple sentences or perform basic numeracy tasks, likely proliferated in Nigeria during the pandemic.

While learning poverty cannot be estimated directly for Nigeria due to lack of data, it now affects up to 70 per cent of children in low- and middle-income countries, according to the World Bank report.

The report read in part, “Even prior to COVID-19, Nigeria had some of the worst human capital outcomes in the world. According to the 2020 Human Capital Index (HCI)—based on a range of markers of health and education including infant mortality, expected years of schooling, sand stunting—a child born in Nigeria that year will grow up to achieve just 36 percent of the productivity he or she could have attained with full health and education. This was below the average for sub-Saharan Africa of around 40 percent. Just six countries had lower HCI scores globally.”

The report further noted that the direct health effects of COVID-19 itself threatened Nigeria’s human capital.

The country recorded its first case of COVID-19 on February 27, 2020 and has subsequently already suffered at least four distinct waves of infection, peaking around June 2020, January 2021, August 2021, and January 2022.”

Brooklyn Report

In another report by Brooklyn Institution, it was noted that COVID-19’s impact on the delivery of health and education services could have more profound long-term consequences for Nigeria’s human capital development.

The report further stated that on the health side, lockdown measures could have prevented or discouraged patients from attending health facilities and the pandemic may have displaced other health services.

Direct evidence on service utilization suggests that outpatient consultations and child vaccinations against other diseases suffered during the pandemic, while adding that high-frequency data collected throughout the pandemic through the Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey (NLPS) reinforce this message, showing—for instance that in July 2020, around 21 percent of households with children 0-5 years old who needed or were due for immunizations could not get their children vaccinated. 

According to the report, “The COVID-19 crisis threatens future generations further through its impact on education. School closures during 2020 reduced children’s attendance rates even after reopening, especially among older children. Dropout was also higher in the households most affected by income shocks, suggesting that households removed children from school in order to support income-generating activities. Using the NLPS data in conjunction with data on the timing of school closures suggests that Nigerian children lost as much as 0.29 learning-adjusted years of schooling, due to both increased dropouts and imperfect mitigation of school shutdowns.”

Expert View

The Social Mobilisation Manager, ActionAid Nigeria, Adewale Adeduntan, said for the new government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to address the current negative position of Nigeria in terms of the Human Capital Index, there are some recommendations that the new administration could consider in implementing.

He urged the president to increase investment in education, which implies that there is need to prioritize education by allocation a significant portion of the budget towards improving the quality of education and access to learning.

“In a way, the idea of the student loan just signed may negate in the sense that subventions going to public institutions maybe reduced, and if that happens, Universities may increase their school fees, and this may shut a lot of people out in a way. As much as possible, we have to increase teachers’ training, by voting more money for that. There should training and re-training of teachers, as well as capacity building programmes and providing adequate resources and infrastructures for schools. We can also implement measures to enhance the enrolment, retention and completion of education by the children especially girls.”

Health Infrastructure

Adeduntan further explained that another thing that the new government may do is to enhance healthcare infrastructure which implies that they have to invest in healthcare to improve access to quality services, across the country especially at the grassroots.

He remarked that not every healthcare challenge at the grassroot should be taken to the tertiary healthcare providers, adding that a large percentage of healthcare programmes at the grass-root level, ought to be settled at the primary healthcare level, and there should be massive investment in healthcare delivery.

The social mobolisation manager, revealed that there is need to promote infrastructure intervention, noting that the cost of food is quite expensive and this has made a lot of Nigerians fall under the malnutrition bracket, “and whether we like it or not, addressing malnutrition and its longtime effect on human capital is very important.”

According to him, “The new administration must invest heavily on targeted nutrition interventions, and this including ramping up our campaign on promoting breast feeding practices because the early stage of development for infants is important because we have to improve access to nutritious foods for infants.

“We also have to fortified staple food that we have around. We must reposition the school feeding programme. We must also raise awareness about proper nutrition and hygiene practices. We must also enhance skills development and vocation training, and this must prioritise to ensure that young people and adults are equipped with skill development and vocational training programme to ensure to solve the problem of unemployment and create a pathway for entrepreneurship. This will ensure that young people have skills that are marketable and grant them livelihood earning. It is important that skill development must prioritise to ensure that HDI is improved.”

Social Protection Programme

Adeduntan advised the federal government to implement and expand social protection programmes to provide a safety net for vulnerable population which may include conditional cash transfer programme that can encourage the education and healthcare utilisation as well as women, children and persons with disability.

Continuing, he said: “It is important that we have to be mindful of promoting gender equality and women empowerment because prioritising gender equality and women empowerment in all sectors including education, health and empowerment will eliminate barriers and discriminatory practices that hinders women access to education and other sectorial concerns such as healthcare and economic opportunities. Doing this will also encourage programmes and policies that promote women leadership and participation in decision making processes. To achieve all of these, it is important that this government must strength data systems and monitoring. We have to improve data collection and monitoring to track progress and identify gaps, and inform evidence-based engagement such that, there will be value for money for all that government is doing. Rather than fixing the deficit we have in human capital development by prioritising areas that are not evidence based in terms of the decisions that are made. What we are advocating is that we should enhance coordination among relevant government agencies.”