Nigeria Reiterates Plan to Pull 100m People Out of Poverty in 2020

Nigeria has restated plans to pull out 100 million of its citizens out of poverty in 2020.

Zainab Ahmed who is the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, said on Monday that the statement is in line with a pledge earlier made by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019.

While speaking during on a TV programme on the NTA, Ahmed noted that the decision is a core mandate of the current administration.

“President Muhammadu Buhari has directed that we must pull 100 million Nigerians out of poverty and that is our major focus. Based on the president’s directives, we want to move fast to make the kind of change the president wanted in the country.

“In 2020, we want to move very fast because we realized that going at the steady rate we are doing is not going to make the kind of change that the president has directed must happen.

“So, we have to make sure that we are creating more jobs and reducing unemployment, and pulling as many Nigerians as possible out of poverty. And that is the reason why when we did the finance bill, you will find that the bill was largely targeted at making businesses easy for the small and very small businesses. This is because we believe that is where the economy needs to really grow and stabilize from.” she said

Nigeria took over from India as the capital of the world as the poorest in the world in the World Poverty clock indices of 2019 which revealed that 91,885,874 people in Nigeria now live in extreme poverty (less than $1.9 or N693.5 per day.

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