The World Bank has said Nigeria could lift up to 13.9 million people out of poverty if it implements a structured N20,000 monthly cash-transfer system targeted at poor households, warning that the country’s current safety-net programmes are too weak and underfunded to deliver meaningful relief.
The Bretton Woods institution delivered the verdict in a new report titled “The State of Social Safety Nets in Nigeria,” obtained by our correspondent on Friday. It urged an increase from the current disbursement of N5,000.
It said Nigeria’s social safety-net programmes are too poorly funded, weakly targeted, and inefficiently executed to deliver meaningful relief to the more than 100 million citizens living in extreme poverty. This comes after the bank revealed that only 44 per cent of total benefits from government-funded safety-net schemes actually reach poor Nigerians.
In its latest assessment, the bank noted that existing interventions “remain too small, too fragmented and too inefficient to move the needle on poverty,” despite the scale of economic hardship confronting millions of citizens.
“At their present scale and design, social protection programmes are simply not adequate to cushion vulnerable families or reverse the rising poverty trend,” the report stated.
It stressed that the combination of high inflation, shrinking household purchasing power, and limited beneficiary reach has weakened the impact of federal welfare spending.
According to the report, simulations show that expanding transfers to N20,000 per month, backed by stronger targeting and increased funding, “could dramatically reduce both the poverty headcount and the depth of deprivation among Nigeria’s poorest households.”
It added that with the right level of investment and a cleaner delivery system, “Nigeria has the potential to lift 13.9 million people out of poverty, more than double what current programmes can achieve.”
According to the World Bank, simulations using Nigeria Living Standards Survey data show that safety nets could significantly reduce poverty and inequality if spending is increased and benefits reach their intended targets.
The bank examined spending scenarios ranging from N500bn to N2.4tn annually, with benefit levels of N5,000 to N20,000 per household per month. The results were striking. Under a clean, perfectly targeted system with zero leakage, N500bn, roughly Nigeria’s current allocation, could lift 3.3 million people out of poverty and cover nearly 70 per cent of the poor.
With N1.8tn (0.9 per cent of GDP), about 10.6 million Nigerians could be lifted out of poverty, while spending N2.4tn (1.2 per cent of GDP, the LMIC average) could lift 13.9 million people above the poverty line.
The report read, “While the impact of the safety net expenditure in Nigeria is negligible, the low impacts are driven by low and inadequate coverage and inefficient spending. Simulations using the NLSS 2018/19 data show that safety nets can have large impacts on poverty and inequality (measured by the depth of poverty) with larger overall expenditures and with efficient spending going directly to the poor.
“The simulations examine scenarios where the overall expenditures vary from N500bn, a very low scenario comparable to the current allocation, to N2.4tn, an ambitious scenario for Nigeria but one of average expenditures (relative to GDP) in other lower-middle-income countries. The simulations vary in benefit size per household from N5,000 to N20,000 per month. The simulations assume that the budget is spent exclusively on poor people, that is, without any targeting errors, leakage, or administrative and operational costs.
“The coverage is then determined by the data based on the budget and benefit size. Poverty impacts can be very significant even under the relatively low expenditures scenario, when spent efficiently. The simulations show that spending N500bn (about 0.2 per cent of GDP) on the poor, without any inefficiency or leakage, can lift 1.6 per cent (3.3 million people) out of poverty and cover close to 70 per cent of the poor. With higher levels of expenditure on the poor, especially expenditures exceeding N1.8tn (0.9 per cent of GDP), 5 per cent (or 10.6 million people) can be lifted out of poverty. With the lower-middle-income country average expenditures of 1.2 per cent of GDP (N2.4tn) on the poor, Nigeria can lift 13.9 million people out of poverty.”
The bank urged the Federal Government to treat safety-net spending as an investment rather than a temporary palliative. “Scaling up cash transfers, particularly towards the N20,000 benchmark, represents one of the most efficient paths to reducing poverty in Nigeria,” it said, adding that wider coverage, not just higher benefit levels, would ensure more equitable relief for the millions living just below the poverty line.
It noted that while several interventions exist on paper, the impact of Nigeria’s welfare spending “remains negligible,” largely because too few poor households are covered and too much of the current funding leaks to non-poor beneficiaries. The bank urged Nigeria to prioritise wider coverage instead of concentrating large benefits on fewer households.
Its analysis shows that spreading N1tn across all poor households, even with smaller benefits, would lift about six million people out of poverty, compared to 5.8 million if the same amount were spent as N20,000 monthly transfers targeted at only one-third of poor households.
The broader coverage also reduces the depth of poverty more effectively, particularly for the millions of citizens just below the poverty line, who need only minimal support to cross it. The World Bank found that the poorest households, those far below the poverty line, remain untouched even by higher transfer amounts.
Under a perfect targeting system, N1tn spent on the poorest third would reduce poverty severity by 1.5 percentage points, nearly double the impact of randomly distributed transfers, but would have almost zero effect on headcount poverty because the poorest are too deep in deprivation to be lifted out with modest transfers.
Earlier, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, announced that the Federal Government plans to deliver digital cash transfers to 15 million households, estimated at 70 million Nigerians. He said 8.5 million households had already received at least one round of the N25,000 grant, with payments to the remaining 6.5 million expected before the end of the year.
Edun described the intervention as a cornerstone of the government’s strategy to cushion the impact of inflation and subsidy removal, but the World Bank report suggests the programme’s short duration and funding limits may not deliver long-term poverty reduction.
The World Bank concluded that Nigeria’s current safety-net architecture is incapable of driving the government’s poverty-eradication ambition unless urgent reforms are made.
It recommended three immediate steps, “Increase overall spending on safety nets, treating them as investments, not handouts, Expand coverage to reach more of the 100 million extremely poor Nigerians, Improve targeting and raise benefit levels to ensure transfers make a measurable impact.
“Nigeria’s safety nets, at their current funding level and implementation pattern, are too small, too narrow, and too diluted to meaningfully reduce extreme poverty,” the report declared.
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