The World Bank has raised serious concerns over the effectiveness of Nigeria’s social safety-net framework, revealing that less than half of the total benefits from government-run programmes actually reach poor households.
According to the Bank’s new report, titled “The State of Social Safety Nets in Nigeria”, roughly 56 per cent of enrolled beneficiaries are classified as poor. Yet only about 44 per cent of the overall social benefits disbursed under these schemes accrue to the poor.
The report identifies a fundamental design flaw in many of the interventions: most programmes allocate a fixed amount per household rather than on a per‐person basis. Because poorer households tend to have more members, the per-head value of transfers is significantly diluted.
For example, while the National Home‑Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP) is cited as a more effective model—since it targets individual pupils rather than households, the scheme is currently limited to children in Grades 1-3 and does not yet have full national coverage.
Moreover, Nigeria’s allocation for social protection is severely low. The World Bank states that just about 0.14 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is allocated to social protection programmes, a figure well below the global average of 1.5 per cent and Sub-Saharan Africa’s average of 1.1 per cent.
At the current level of expenditure and reach, the Bank says, the impact of social safety nets on poverty reduction has been minimal. The combined effect of all existing programmes is estimated to reduce the national poverty headcount by just 0.4 percentage points.
The report further highlights Nigeria’s reliance on external assistance for funding safety-net programmes: between 2015 and 2021, donor aid accounted for about 60 per cent of federal expenditures on such schemes, with the World Bank itself providing over 92 per cent of that support. The Bank warns that this dependency leaves the system vulnerable to funding shortfalls.
On a positive note, the National Social Safety Nets Programme (NASSP), which uses the National Social Registry (NSR) to identify vulnerable households, is shown to yield better results: among its beneficiaries it reduced poverty by 4.3 percentage points and narrowed the poverty gap by 4.2 percentage points. The NSR now covers over 85 million individuals, making it the largest such database in Sub-Saharan Africa.
While the October Nigeria Development Update emphasized fiscal consolidation and revenue mobilization to create space for development spending, the new report provides specific recommendations for how to channel those resources into social protection.
Both reports acknowledge that Nigeria’s removal of petrol subsidies which had cost the country significantly creates a unique opportunity. The fuel subsidy removal is projected to save about 5.2 percent of GDP annually. The social safety nets report recommends that allocating just one-fifth of these savings would enable Nigeria to align its social protection spending with regional averages.
The Bank therefore calls for urgent reforms: better targeting of beneficiaries, indexation of benefit levels to household size, improved coordination among government levels, use of real-time data, and increased domestic funding to secure more sustainable social protection architecture.
