The World Bank has projected a grim outlook for Nigeria’s fight against poverty, warning that more Nigerians are expected to fall below the poverty line by 2027.
According to the latest Africa’s Pulse report, released during the 2025 IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington, D.C., poverty in Nigeria and other resource-rich but fragile African economies is expected to rise by 3.6 percentage points between 2022 and 2027.
The report attributed the looming rise in poverty to Nigeria’s overreliance on oil revenues, persistent economic fragility, and weak governance structures.
“Poverty in resource-rich, fragile countries, including large economies like Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is projected to increase by 3.6 percentage points between 2022 and 2027,” the report stated.
Despite modest gains in Nigeria’s non-oil sector in the last quarter of 2024, the World Bank cautioned that the improvement is unlikely to yield broad-based poverty reduction due to enduring fiscal and institutional vulnerabilities.
The Bretton Woods institution revealed that Sub-Saharan Africa remains the poorest region globally, hosting 80% of the world’s 695 million people living in extreme poverty as of 2024. Nigeria, alongside three other countries in the region, accounts for half of the 560 million extremely poor people.
In comparison, South Asia was home to 8% of the global extremely poor population, East Asia and the Pacific 2%, the Middle East and North Africa 5%,
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