The World Bank has revealed that around 75.5% of rural Nigerians are currently living below the poverty line, showing a worsening of the economic conditions in the country’s rural areas.
This information was shared in the World Bank’s April 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief for Nigeria, which paints a bleak picture of growing poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment across the nation.
The report highlights that the situation is far worse in rural areas, where factors like economic stagnation, high inflation, and insecurity have worsened living conditions. At the same time, poverty is also widespread in urban areas.
According to the latest official data from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, 30.9% of Nigerians were living below the international extreme poverty line of $2.15 per person per day during 2018/19, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report further pointed out that poverty in Nigeria is still highly regional. In the northern parts of the country, the poverty rate was 46.5% in 2018/19, compared to 13.5% in the southern regions. The report also noted that inequality, measured by the Gini index, stood at 35.1 in 2018/19.
Nigeria’s Prosperity Gap, which measures how much people’s incomes need to increase to reach a standard of $25 per day, is estimated at 10.2, which is higher than most other countries. This suggests that, despite various policy efforts, the economic divide in the country remains persistent.
Children aged 0 to 14 years have a high poverty rate of 72.5%, reflecting the extent of deprivation among the country’s youngest population, according to the report’s demographic analysis.
The report also revealed that poverty is more prevalent among Nigerians with less education. Those with no formal education had a poverty rate of 79.5%, compared to 61.9% for those with primary education, 50% for secondary school graduates, and only 25.4% for those with tertiary education.
The World Bank report also highlighted multidimensional poverty, showing that 30.9% of Nigerians live on less than $2.15 per day, 32.6% lack access to basic drinking water, 45.1% don’t have adequate sanitation, and 39.4% don’t have access to electricity.
Additionally, 17.6% of adults have not completed primary school, and 9% of households report that at least one school-aged child is not enrolled in school, indicating that education access remains a major issue.
Before the pandemic, efforts to reduce extreme poverty were largely stagnant, with the rate of decline in extreme poverty only decreasing by half a percentage point annually since 2010, the report noted.
The urban poor are also seeing little improvement in their living conditions. The lack of jobs that can help families rise out of poverty is another critical challenge.
Despite acknowledging the Nigerian government’s recent economic reforms, the World Bank warned that high inflation continues to hurt households’ purchasing power, especially in urban areas where incomes have not kept up with rising costs.
The World Bank urged the government to take immediate action to protect vulnerable groups from inflationary shocks and create more productive jobs to help improve the situation.
