ActionAid Calls for New Strategies to Combat Poverty

Michael Olugbode in Abuja

ActionAid Nigeria has said there was an urgent need to evolve new strategies to combat the growing level of poverty in the country.

ActionAid Nigeria is a social justice non-governmental organisation working to eradicate poverty and all forms of injustice in Nigeria. It is an affiliate member of the ActionAid International Federation with a presence in 45 countries, and works in solidarity with people living in poverty and exclusion to achieve social justice, gender equality, and poverty eradication towards achieving a just, equitable, and sustainable world in which every person enjoys the right to a life of dignity, freedom from poverty and all forms of oppression.

Speaking at a breakfast meeting with donors and partners yesterday, the Country Director of ActionAid Nigeria, Andrew Mamedu, said the time for massive actions to combat growing poverty in the nation had come, insisting that Nigeria cannot pretend that all was normal.

Mamedu, while lamenting that, “We are faced with 133 million Nigerians that are living in multidimensional poverty,” noted that, “we have no business living in poverty and action should be taken to take Nigerians living in poverty out of it.”

The Country Director who stated that ActionAid’s vision was for a Nigeria without poverty, said he was ready to work with various stakeholders to put an end to poverty in the country.

He decried that poverty in Nigeria was man-made, stressing that, “since it man-made, then it can be dealt with, we have to remove the root causes of poverty and that is what we in ActionAid are here to do.

“There is no way we can achieve that alone, we have development partners, we have donor agencies, we have government agencies, we have all our partners both internationally and nationally, we are look up to them to fight poverty together.

“We are looking at it from top to bottom and from bottom to the top. We are going to evolve both strategies to fight poverty to a standstill.”

He disclosed that ActionAid was going to review strategies on the fight against poverty.

Also speaking at the event, one of the ambassadors of ActionAid, Hilda Dokubo, said Nigeria cannot afford to allow its citizen to flee the country because of poverty, adding that all Nigerians needed to fight it together.

She said the option of fleeing the country was unacceptable, describing it as nothing but donating our children to foreign lands.

She noted that at present many Nigerians were half Nigerian citizens, and should the trend continues their children would be fully non-Nigerians.

She said all stakeholders should do something urgently to put an end to this, noting that there must be accountability around the nation resources.

Dokubo said if the resources of the nation was properly managed, poverty would be far away from Nigeria and there would be no need for Nigerians fleeing for greener pasture.