The World Bank has reported that despite efforts by the Federal Government to alleviate poverty in the country through Social Safety Net programmes, only 44 per cent of the total benefits actually reach poor households.
The development finance institution, therefore, raised concerns over the inefficiency of the social safety net programmes as the majority of the country’s poor population remained unreached.
In its latest report titled “The State of Social Safety Nets in Nigeria”, the World Bank disclosed that 56 per cent of beneficiaries of government safety net programmes are poor, yet only 44 per cent of the total benefits actually reach poor households.
According to the bank, this disparity highlights a significant inequality in benefit distribution, suggesting that Nigeria’s current safety net architecture, though expansive in design, fails to adequately target and sustain the country’s most vulnerable populations.
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It reported: “While 56 per cent of the beneficiaries are poor, only 44 per cent of the total safety net benefits go to the poor. For each program category … the share of benefits going to the poor is lower than the share of beneficiaries that are poor.”
The Washington D.C-based bank attributed the perceived inefficiency largely to the structure of benefit allocation, which, in most cases, is determined at the household level rather than on an individual basis.
It further expatiated: “This inefficiency arises because benefit levels for most programs, including the NASSP cash transfer program, are determined at the household level, but poor people tend to live in larger households. That is, even for well-targeted programs, the same benefit amount is divided over a larger number of people living in poorer households.”
The World Bank identified the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) as an example of an initiative that targeted individuals directly and could mitigate such inefficiencies, noting however, that the NHGSFP’s limited scope, that is targeting only children in grades 1 to 3, restricts its impact.
Specifically, it reported that Programs such as the NHGSFP, which target individuals and not households, should be less affected by these issues, noting that the NHGSFP only benefits children in grades 1 to 3, and does not yet have full coverage, which limits the number of children per household that can benefit from the program.
Recently, some analysts have called on the government to consider a comprehensive reform of Nigeria’s social protection framework, including the integration of real-time data, improved household targeting, and better coordination among federal and state agencies.
For instance, one of the leading private sector-oriented advocacy groups, the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) urged the government to strengthen social protection programmes to shield vulnerable Nigerians from the negative impacts of its ongoing economic reforms, amid signs of stability of the economy.
