After a serious assessment of the the impact Covid-19 has on economies of developing countries, the World Bank has predicted that an estimated 95.7 million Nigerians would become extremely poor, by 2022.
This report, which was released by World Bank, indicates that without the recent pandemic, 90 million Nigerians were already predicted to live in extreme poverty, with an income under a dollar, daily. This situation will now be aggravated , due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
World Bank said: “With real per capita GDP growth forecast to be negative in all sectors in 2020, poverty will deepen for the current poor, while those households that were just above the poverty line prior to the COVID-19 crisis will fall into poverty.
“Were the crisis not to have hit (the counterfactual scenario), the poverty headcount rate would be forecast to remain virtually unchanged, with the number of poor people set to rise from 82.9 million today to 85.2 million in 2020 and 90.0 million in 2022 due to natural population growth.
“Given the effects of the crisis, however, the national poverty headcount rate is instead forecast to jump from 40.1 percent today to 42.5 percent in 2020 and 42.9 percent in 2022, implying that the number of poor people will be 90.2 million in 2020 and 95.7 million in 2022.
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‘Thus, taking the difference between these two scenarios, the crisis alone is forecast to drive an additional 4.9 million people into poverty this year, with an additional 5.7 million people living in poverty by 2022.”
According to the World Bank report, those who will be pushed into this extreme poverty, will most likely be those living in urban areas and earning through services.
“More than one-third of the additional people forecast to be pushed into poverty by the COVID-19 crisis are expected to be in urban areas, while just 15.9 percent of the current poor are urban dwellers.
“Only 13.1 percent of the additional poor people in 2022 are predicted to be in households where the head works primarily in agriculture, while, today, 56.0 percent of poor Nigerians live in agricultural households.
‘Many Nigerians who are not poor today are vulnerable to falling below the poverty line due to the COVID-19 crisis. People living only just above the poverty line are more susceptible to becoming poor when shocks occur. Those with consumption levels between the poverty line and 1.5 times the poverty line may be defined as ‘vulnerable’ ”, the bank said.
It was pointed out that those in rural areas have more than three-quarters of the population more susceptible to poverty. Most Nigerians, especially those in poor households, farmers or non-farm enterprises, would be most affected by the Covid-19 crisis.
