The Federal Government should implement reforms to protect the nation’s poorest from rising inflation, according to the World Bank.
The bank also urged the government to encourage all Nigerians’ livelihoods through more productive work, which it believed would be essential for lowering the country’s high poverty levels.
This was stated by the World Bank in its most recent Poverty and Equity Brief for Nigeria, which was released on Monday.
In its Africa’s Pulse report earlier last month, the bank stated that more Nigerians would become poor over the next five years, citing the country’s structural economic flaws, reliance on oil revenues, and national fragility as major obstacles to real poverty reduction.
The government started temporary cash transfers to 15 million households to lessen the inflationary effects of recent reforms on the poor.
The bank claimed that the roll-out has been slow.
President Bola Tinubu’s administration implemented bold economic reforms, including the repeal of fuel subsidies and the naira floating, on May 29, 2023.
Inflation rates increased as a result of the reforms.
The previous month’s inflation rate, which was the lowest since June 2023, was slightly higher, to 24.23 percent in March 2025.
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The largest component of the inflation basket, food inflation, decreased from 23.51 percent in the previous month to 21.79 percent.
The core inflation rate increased from 23.01 percent in the previous month to 24.43 percent, excluding the prices of volatile agricultural goods and energy. Consumer prices increased by 3.90 percent each month in March, up from 2.04 percent in February.
The World Bank argued that “poverty has increased and expanded as a result of multiple shocks in a time of high economic insecurity.” According to World Bank projections, more than half of Nigerians (54%) are estimated to be in poverty by 2024 because 42 million additional people have fallen into poverty since 2018/19.
Although recent macroeconomic reforms have begun to stabilize the economy, inflation continues to rise, lowering consumer demand and further lowering Nigerians’ ability to purchase goods. Many Nigerians, especially those in urban areas, are now in poverty because labor incomes have not risen with inflation.
According to the statement, the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) reform’s recent fiscal savings could be used to fund the expansion of the social protection system with a focus on enhancing resilience and enabling human capital investments.
According to the World Bank, this would be essential to reducing the impact of upcoming shocks and enabling households to make the necessary human capital investments to prevent intergenerational poverty transmission.
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These temporary measures must be supplemented by economic diversification, which expands the non-oil sector and creates jobs in the private sector, as well as by investments in public services, particularly in those in health, education, and infrastructure. In the face of limited fiscal space, “added,” improving the effectiveness and efficiency of public investments is particularly crucial.
According to the report, 30.9% of Nigerians lived below the 2017 PPP, or $2.15 per person per day (IELTS), level before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the most recent official household survey data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Source: Channels TV
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