Despite having the highest GDP base in Africa, Nigeria is still among the top five poorest countries in the world. At the ongoing IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, Jim Yong Kim stated that Nigeria is one of the top five countries that with the largest number of poor. The World Bank President said Nigeria ranked third in the world while India ranked number one with 33 per cent of the world poor. China is ranked second with 13 per cent of the world’s poor, followed by Nigeria where seven per cent of the world poor live in. He said that Bangladesh has six per cent share of the world’s poor while the Democratic Republic of Congo has five per cent of the world’s poor population.
Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, said, “It is a sad commentary on our prosperous world that over one billion people live in extreme poverty. It is a welcome call from the World Bank Group to not just mitigate poverty but bring it to closure and also to strive for a more equitable world. To achieve these ends we will need determination, but also ideas and innovation, for the ways of the economy can be strange.”
He noted that the World Bank’s shared prosperity goal, endorsed by shareholders in 2013, provides a window into understanding inequalities of income and opportunities, stressing that while significant progress has been made in lifting people out of extreme poverty, many people remain poor, often due to lack of opportunity.
The top five countries, in terms of numbers of poor, are India (with 33 percent of the world’s poor), China (13 percent), Nigeria (7 percent), Bangladesh (6 percent) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5 percent), which together are home to nearly 760 million of the world’s poor. Adding another five countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya – would encompass almost 80 percent of the extreme poor. “Hence, a sharp emphasis on these countries will be central to ending extreme poverty, he said.
Jim Yong Kim said these five countries are home to 760 million of the world’s poor, adding that another five countries, Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya would encompass almost 80 per cent of the extreme poor.
Noting that a sharp focus on these will be central to ending poverty, the world Bank President said “while economic growth remains vital for reducing poverty, growth has its limits, according to a new World Bank paper released today. Countries need to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocate more resources to the extreme poor. These resources can be distributed through the growth process itself, by promoting more inclusive growth, or through government programs, such as conditional and direct cash transfers.
