Nigeria surpasses India’s poverty level

Six Nigerians become poor every minute, just as over 87 million people of the country’s population live in poverty, report by the Brookings Institution, data from the World Poverty Clock, has revealed.
The National Bureau of Statistics had in 2016 raised similar fear when it reported that no fewer than 112 million Nigerians live below the poverty line.
Wikipedia has described the World Poverty Clock as a tool to monitor progress against poverty globally and regionally. It similarly provides real-time poverty data across countries.
Created by the Vienna-based NGO, World Data Lab in 2017, it is funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In every April and October, the World Poverty Clock data are updated to take into account new household surveys and new projections on countries’ economic growth from the International Monetary Funds’ World Economic Outlook.
These form the basic building blocks for poverty trajectories computed for 188 countries and territories, developed and developing, across the world.
Releasing its current report, the body said, “according to our projections, Nigeria has already overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extreme poor in early 2018, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take over the number two.
“At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million.
“What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India continues to fall.
“In fact, by the end of 2018 in Africa as a whole, there will probably be about 3.2 million more people living in extreme poverty than there are today.”