COVID-19 to Push 5m Nigerians Into Extreme Poverty -World Bank

• COVID-19 to Push 5m Nigerians Into Extreme Poverty -World Bank

The World Bank has said 5 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty in Nigeria in 2020.

In the bank’s latest report titled ‘The impact of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) on global poverty: Why Sub-Saharan Africa might be the region hardest hit’, the bank estimated that COVID-19 pandemic will push between 40 million to 60 million people into extreme poverty globally.

“Another way to put this is that the estimates suggest that COVID-19 will push 49 million people into extreme poverty in 2020,” the bank stated.

Despite the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicting that emerging markets and developing economies will contract by 1 percent this year, the World Bank said with more people living close to the international poverty line, ‘the developing world, low- and middle-income countries will suffer the greatest consequences in terms of extreme poverty.’

It stated that while Sub-Saharan Africa has been less hit by the COVID-19 from a health perspective, the region will be hit the hardest in terms of increased extreme poverty.

It estimated that out of the 49 million extremely poor people predicted, 23 million will come from Sub-Saharan Africa alone while 16 million will be from South Asia.

The bank, however, listed India, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo as the three nations that will experience the largest change in the number of extremely poor people.

“At the country-level, the three countries with the largest change in the number of poor are estimated to be India (12 million), Nigeria (5 million) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (2 million). Countries such as Indonesia, South Africa, and China are also forecasted to have more than one million people pushed into extreme poverty as a consequence of COVID-19,” the report reads.

“When looking at the impact of the pandemic on higher poverty lines, for example, the number of people living on less than $3.20 or $5.50 per day, more than 100 million people will be pushed into poverty. Latin America & Caribbean, East Asia & Pacific and the Middle East & North Africa are all expected to have at least 10 million more people living on less than $5.50 per day.”