General

POOREST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! Nigeria overtakes India

Published

June 25, 2018

Nigeria has overtaken India as the world’s poorest country in the World Poverty Clock data as recently updated.

Each April and October, the World Poverty Clock data are updated to take into account new household surveys (an additional 97 surveys were made available this April) and new projections on country economic growth from the International Monetary Funds’s World Economic Outlook.

These form the basic building blocks for poverty trajectories computed for 188 countries and territories, developed and developing, across the world.

The data highlight two new storylines about what is happening to global extreme poverty…

First: Extreme poverty in today’s world is largely about Africa
According to our projections, Nigeria has already overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extreme poor in early 2018, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take over the number 2 spot (Figure 1 below).

At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India continues to fall. In fact, by the end of 2018 in Africa as a whole, there will probably be about 3.2 million more people living in extreme poverty than there are today.Already, Africans account for about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor. If current trends persist, they will account for nine-tenths by 2030. Fourteen out of 18 countries in the world—where the number of extreme poor is rising—are in Africa.