Nigeria’s Hungry Children: Poverty and Malnutrition Threaten a Generation
- Dr Khalid W. A. Shomali
- Jan 16
- 6 min read
A tired mother holds her underweight toddler in a dusty health center outside of Kano in northern Nigeria. The infant is seriously malnourished, according to the nurse's harsh assessment. These kinds of scenes, which are frequently hidden from view, occur on a daily basis throughout Nigeria and represent a national catastrophe with far-reaching implications. Chronic starvation has stunted growth and endangered the lives of millions of people, including this mother's child. Stunting, or being too short for their age owing to malnutrition, affects about four out of ten Nigerian children under five, and undernutrition is a contributing factor in over half of all deaths in this age group. Poverty and this issue are closely related since Nigeria has persistently high rates of poverty despite decades of government initiatives to improve living conditions.
Why do so many children in Nigeria suffer from malnutrition? Poverty is a major factor. It goes without saying that children from affluent homes have several benefits, including access to healthcare, better sanitation, cleaner water, and more food on the table. Higher socioeconomic status (SES) and improved child health are in fact strongly correlated, according to studies conducted all over the world. However, the relationship is complicated since causes and effects might be obscured by things like genetics or parental education.
Undernutrition in children is a worldwide public health concern that is assessed using metrics like underweight (low weight-for-age), stunting (low height-for-age), and wasting (low weight-for-height). In 2020, 820 million people worldwide—1 in 9—were undernourished or hungry. In 2022, 148.1 million children under five had a stunting prevalence of 22.3% worldwide. The prevalence of stunting in Africa was 31% representing 56.2 million children under the age of five. With a countrywide prevalence rate of 37% of children aged 6-59 months, Nigeria has the second-highest burden of stunted children worldwide. Additionally, at the end of 2018, 2% of Nigerian children aged 6 to 59 months were overweight, 22% were underweight, and 7% were wasting.
Over 3 million children under the age of five die each year due to undernutrition, which accounts for 45% of these deaths. Undernutrition in children results in poor cognitive development, poor educational performance, low adult productivity, and economic costs that can reach 11% of GDP. Human capital accumulation, adult health, and employment status are all impacted by childhood health. There is conflicting and unclear evidence between children's health and socioeconomic status (SES). SES and children's health were found to be positively correlated in some research, but in others, the association was found to be weak or nonexistent.
Low SES can have an impact on health status and, in turn, the development of human capital, according to studies that indicated a positive and significant association between SES and children's health. It is still unknown, nevertheless, if SES has a direct impact on children's health or if unobserved factors are causing erroneous correlations. Additionally, there is conflicting and inconclusive findings regarding whether the child health-SES gradient rises with age.
Researchers and policymakers continue to have serious concerns about the mechanisms underlying the link between SES and children's health. This is because there may be a correlation between household SES and children's health; children's health may influence household SES, and the relationship between household SES and children's health may also be caused by unobserved factors or parental characteristics (such as poor genetics and health-related behaviors). Making informed policy decisions to lessen health disparities and poor health outcomes requires an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between SES and children's health.
Nigeria is an intriguing case study in this regard because, despite the adoption of many national and subnational alleviation initiatives, the country has struggled to reduce poverty since the 1980s, with rising levels of extreme poverty. Over the years, Nigeria has implemented about thirty programs aimed at reducing poverty. The factors responsible for the failure of poverty alleviation programs in Nigeria include inadequate political will, political instability, ineffective policy continuity, particularly during the military era, corruption, mismanagement of resources allotted for poverty alleviation, violence, terrorism, insurgencies, communal and interreligious conflicts, declines in petroleum product prices, budget deficits to finance the reduction of poverty, poor mechanisms of sustainability, lack of transparency and accountability, inadequate coordination, ineffective budgetary management, and failure of policy mechanism targets.
The trends in Nigeria's poverty rate from 1980 to 2019 are depicted in Figure (1). As of 2019, 82.9 million people, or 40.1% of Nigeria's 201 million residents, were living in poverty, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). Nigeria's poverty rate was predicted by the World Bank to rise from 40.1% (82.9 million) in 2019 to 42% (89 million) in 2020 and 42.6% (95.1 million) in 2022. However, 63% of Nigerians, or 133 million people, were multidimensionally poor in 2022, according to the NBS. Six factors make up the multidimensional poverty measure: income or consumption, educational attainment, enrollment in school, drinking water, sanitation, and power.
Furthermore, the prevalence of multidimensional poverty differs among geopolitical zones and across urban and rural areas. In 2022, the prevalence of multidimensional poverty was 72% in rural regions and 42% in urban areas. Multidimensional poverty is more common in Northern Nigeria than in Southern Nigeria. The prevalence of multidimensional poverty varied by state, ranging from 27.2% in Ondo State to 90.5% in Sokoto State. Between December 2022 and April 2023, an estimated four million Nigerians lived in poverty. This is on top of the fact that in 2022, 63% of people lived in multidimensional poverty.
Poverty by place of residence (rural vs. urban) and education level (high-skilled vs. low-skilled) is depicted in Figure (2). It shows that children from low-income households were more likely than those from high-income households to have moms with low levels of education. Additionally, the graph indicates that children from low-income households were more likely than those from high-income households to reside in rural areas.
Figure (3) shows the kinds of health care services women obtained based on SES quintiles. The mother's usage of maternal health care services is determined by three factors: whether she gave birth in an institution, whether she received quality prenatal care, and if she received skilled postpartum care. The link between SES and the utilization of maternal health care services shows a gradient from the poorest to the affluent moms. Compared to mothers in the richest and highest quintiles, mothers in the poorest quintiles were less likely to use maternal health care services.
Maternal nutrition may act as a mediator in the association between poverty and children's nutritional condition. Undernourished moms are more likely to give birth to children who are ill because they may inherit health risks from their mothers or grow up in an unhealthy or unsupportive environment. The child health-SES gradient must take maternal nutrition into account since undernourished women are more likely to be impoverished because they might not be able to earn enough money to meet their children's needs.
The results have implications for attaining Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) goals 1.0 and 2.2, which seek to end poverty and all forms of malnutrition by 2030, respectively. Meeting the global goals for stunting and wasting in children under five by 2025 is part of this. Improving children's nutritional condition would need the development and successful use of affordable interventions and policies targeted at lowering poverty. Because their parents are unable to invest in their health and give them access to the necessary medical care, children from low-SES homes are more likely to suffer from health shocks. Therefore, evidence-based social welfare policies aimed at improving the health of children from low-SES households should be implemented by policymakers.
Additionally, the mechanisms underlying the relationship between poverty and children's nutritional status may include health care service utilization, maternal health care service use, household nutrition, child-specific nutrition intake, maternal nutrition, and illness episodes. This suggests that it would be crucial to prioritize interventions aimed at improving these factors. A key takeaway from the results is that reducing poverty and improving children’s nutritional status would require a multicomponent intervention that combines evidence-based social welfare programs with successful tactics aimed at particular problems like low health care service utilization, poor access to maternal health care services, inadequate household nutrition, inadequate child-specific nutrition intake, poor maternal nutrition, and illness episodes.
The implementation of poverty alleviation programs and policymakers in charge of anti-poverty or nutrition policies must have the political will and dedication to address the issue of poverty and poor child nutritional status based on scientific evidence rather than anecdotal evidence in order to achieve SDG targets 1.0 and 2.2. The growing rates of extreme poverty during the 1980s, in spite of the implementation of numerous initiatives to combat poverty, show that the current strategy needs to be changed.
