By Zuhumnan Dapel
From the article:
Studies that reflect the movement of poverty levels at a particular point-in-time attract a lot of attention. They also inform academic and policy debates across the globe. In Africa, where poverty levels remain high, these snapshots of poverty levels are a big deal.
Grand new narratives emerge from snapshots of poverty levels. For example, the Africa Rising narrative was largely made on the back of numbers that reflected a massive wave of poverty reduction across the continent. Another is that Nigeria recorded remarkable success in its fight against poverty between 1996 and 2004. This is based on claims that the percentage of those living on less than $1.25 per day declined by 27.63% during this period. This would mean that about 27.13 million Nigerians escaped poverty.
While these snapshots can be useful, they are fundamentally insufficient and can be misleading. Our study of poverty numbers in Nigeria shows how unreliable the numbers are.
We took a different approach, one that’s been gaining traction in recent years – the study of the mobility of poverty, or the movement of people in and out of poverty over time.
It provides a much richer and nuanced understanding of poverty because it challenges the conventional view of “the poor” as a homogeneous and essentially static population.
Applying this approach, our study on poverty mobility in Nigeria found that between 1980 and 2010 there are more people falling into poverty than escaping it. And based on a related study, about 72%-91% of Nigeria’s poor are at risk of spending their entire life below the poverty line.
...
We also established that chronic poverty is less prevalent in Nigeria’s oil producing region and more prevalent in the country’s northeast and that 81% of those trapped in poverty were from the north.
Read the full article here.