By John Ikani
In what will gladden the heart of some people, even though it is a little progress, Nigeria is no longer the world’s poverty capital. India has surpassed the ‘Giant of Africa’ as the nation with the highest number of extremely poor people in the world.
This was made known in a recent update released by the The World Poverty Clock (WPC) an online tool that monitors the progress against poverty globally and regionally and provides real-time poverty data across countries.
According to its data, extremely poor people are those living on N800 per day (less than $2 per day).
In 2018, Nigeria held the position with about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million.
In 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, said more than 80 million Nigerians live in extreme poverty (on a dollar per day).
Fast forward to 2022, the WPC said 70 million people are living in extreme poverty, representing 33 per cent of Nigeria’s over 200 million people.
For India, the data revealed that about 83 million Indians have been plunged into extreme poverty in 2022, representing six per cent of the country’s population which stands at 1.3 billion.
According to the WPC, the worsening poverty index in India is not unconnected to economic disaster caused by the COVID-19 pandemic which led to unprecedented job losses and plunged economies of nations including India into recession.
