What should Nigeria's wealth-creation plan look like?

Apr 07, 2022|Gbemisola Alonge

No food for lazy man…

Well, that's only if you're doing the right work. Many times in Nigeria, hard work does not exempt you from hunger.

Unfortunately, being a person in Nigeria means that you're working to actively prevent poverty, but even the work can't save you. This trend explains why the working poverty rate is as high as 40% in low-income countries. In Africa, 55% of the poor are employed. This means they're in working poverty, and we discussed this in detail in a previous article. On the other hand, fewer non-poor people are employed.

In-work poverty or working poverty is when the people with jobs are still unable to afford the necessities for living, such as feeding, shelter and more.

Key takeaways:

Nigeria is currently suffering from in-work poverty caused by the quality of jobs available and the quality of job seekers in the country.
Therefore steps to correcting in-work poverty involves directly resolving the issue of the quality of jobs by providing incentives for companies that have the capacity to create high growth jobs.
Simultaneously, the government would have to provide unemployment benefits for workers, while empowering them with the skills required to take on high growth jobs with long term career prospects.

Many people remain in poverty even while working because of the kinds of jobs they are engaged in. There are many reasons why in-work poverty exists in different countries, but we identified some of those peculiar to Nigeria in our previous article. The first and most obvious reason is that many jobs don't pay well. Other causes are the poor distribution of well-paying jobs across the country, the volatility of farming and non-farm household jobs, the poor structure of in-wage jobs in poorer states, and the lack of skills to acquire well-paying jobs.

We can break