The United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, says more Nigerians have fallen into multidimensional poverty, with an additional 17.9 million people affected between 2021 and 2024.
The figure was contained in the 2026 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, MPI, report released on Monday. The report was co-produced by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, OPHI, at the University of Oxford.
According to the comparable trend series in the report, the proportion of Nigerians living in multidimensional poverty rose to 38.7 percent in 2024 from 33 percent in 2021. This pushes the number of affected people to 90.1 million in 2024, up from 72.2 million in 2021.
The UNDP said Nigeria recorded the largest increase in absolute numbers among the five countries that saw a rise in multidimensional poverty over their latest measurement periods. The other countries are Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Guinea and Kyrgyzstan.
The report noted that the latest rise has reversed the progress Nigeria made between 2018 and 2021 when multidimensional poverty declined.
It also showed a worsening depth of poverty. Nigeria’s MPI value, which combines incidence and intensity, increased from 0.175 in 2021 to 0.208 in 2024, while the intensity of deprivation among the poor rose from 52.9 percent to 53.6 percent.
Unlike income poverty, the MPI measures overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards, across 10 indicators including nutrition, child mortality, years of schooling, school attendance, cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and assets.
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