The World Bank Group has predicted that a growing number of Nigerians will fall into poverty by 2027, despite the country’s wealth of resources.
The World Bank made this statement on Thursday in its Africa Pulse report, which was released during the ongoing Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Washington, DC, USA.
In 2024, the global organisation projected that over half of Nigeria’s population would be living in poverty. The report highlighted that sub-Saharan Africa holds the highest extreme poverty rate in the world, with a significant portion of the impoverished population concentrated in a few nations.
The institution stated that around 80 percent of the estimated 695 million extreme poor globally will be located in this region in 2024, as compared to eight percent in South Asia, two percent in East Asia and the Pacific, five percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and three percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“This follows a well-established pattern, whereby resource wealth combined with fragility or conflict is associated with the highest poverty rates—an average poverty rate of 46 percent in 2024, 13 percentage points above non-fragile, resource-rich countries,” the Bank said.
Specifically, for Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (identified as resource-rich but fragile nations), the organisation reported that “poverty is projected to rise by 3.6 percentage points from 2022 to 2027.”
The report observed that among the groups in the region, only resource-rich countries are experiencing increasing poverty rates.
According to the report, countries in this group are anticipated to continue lowering poverty at a faster pace than resource-rich nations due to rising agricultural commodity prices.
In contrast, the report noted that resource-rich nations are not expected to experience the same growth rate due to the decline in oil prices.
