Nigeria has a 96.7 million poor people, second to only India with 228.9 million poor population.
The population of Nigeria is projected at 214.0 million while India has 1.1 billion.
India, despite the poor population of 228.9 million, lifted around 415 million people out of poverty between 2005-06 and 2019-21, with the incidence of poverty falling from 55 per cent to just over 16 per cent over this period.
The figures, contained in the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (GMPI) 2022, was released Monday by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford.
With the projected 2022 figures, the number of poor persons in Nigeria has had a four-year increase of 14.7 percent from the 2018/19 figure of 82.1 million to 96.7 million in 2022, which was partly aided by the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and the growing population.
And despite the GMPI figures, according to the Human Development Index (HDI) rankings, Nigeria was classified as a country in the low HDI category while India was classified in the medium HDI, with an HDI of 0.539 and 0.645 respectively.
They were based on the projected population in 2020.
The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index is a key international resource that measures acute multidimensional poverty across more than 100 developing countries and was first launched in 2010 by the OPHI and the Human Development Report Office of the UNDP.
The MPI monitors deprivations in 10 indicators spanning health, education and standard of living and includes both incidence as well as intensity of poverty.
The most common profile, affecting 3.9 percent of poor people, includes deprivations in four indicators: nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation, and housing.
More than 45.5 million poor people are deprived in only these four indicators. Of those people, 34.4 million live in India, 2.1 million in Bangladesh and 1.9 million in Pakistan—making this a “predominantly South Asian profile”—said the MPI report.
“India’s progress shows that this goal (Sustainable Development Goal 1.2 to reduce poverty) is feasible, even at a large scale,” said the report, adding that India shows significant reduction in all 10 indicators.
The 2019-2021 data show that about 4.2 per cent of the population live in severe poverty and about 18.7 per cent people, roughly the same proportion as in 2015-2016, are vulnerable to poverty.
“Two-thirds of these people live in a household in which at least one person is deprived in nutrition—a worrying statistic. Based on 2020 population data for India, it has by far the largest number of poor people worldwide (228.9 million), followed by Nigeria (96.7 million projected in 2020),” it said.
The incidence of poverty in India fell from 36.6 per cent in 2015-2016 to 21.2 per cent in 2019-2021 in rural areas and from 9.0 per cent to 5.5 per cent in urban areas, said the MPI report.
The drop in poverty demonstrates that the “Sustainable Development Goal target 1.2 of reducing at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions by 2030 is possible to achieve—and at scale,” said the report.
The report said that the poorest states in the country reduced poverty the fastest and deprivations in all indicators fell significantly among poor people. Poverty among children fell faster in absolute terms, although India still has the highest number of poor children in the world. More than one in five children in India are poor (21.8 per cent, or 97 million) compared with around one in seven adults (13.9 per cent).
