The World Bank has raised concern over the inefficiency of Nigeria’s welfare system, revealing that less than half of the nation’s social safety-net benefits reach its poorest citizens.
In a report titled The State of Social Safety Nets in Nigeria (November 2025), the global lender said only 44 percent of all welfare benefits go to the poor, while a majority of recipients do not fall within the poverty bracket.
The report attributed this gap to weak programme design, poor targeting, and insufficient funding.
According to the findings, most of Nigeria’s flagship initiatives, including the National Social Safety Nets Programme, allocate benefits on a flat household basis rather than per individual.
This approach, the bank said, leaves larger poor families receiving disproportionately smaller amounts, undermining the core goal of equitable poverty reduction.
While some programmes like the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme have shown better targeting efficiency, their limited scope restricts their reach.
The school feeding scheme, for instance, focuses only on pupils from grades one to three, excluding older students who may also need support.
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The World Bank’s report further highlighted Nigeria’s extremely low social protection spending, pegged at just 0.14 percent of the national GDP , far below the global average of 1.5 percent and Sub-Saharan Africa’s 1.1 percent.
Consequently, the cumulative effect of all social welfare interventions has reduced national poverty by only 0.4 percentage points, with little or no impact on inequality.
Despite recent reforms, including the federal government’s cash-transfer programme targeting 15 million households, the bank described Nigeria’s current welfare model as “inefficient and unsustainable.”
It warned that donor dependency — which accounted for roughly 60 percent of total social safety-net funding between 2015 and 2021 — poses a serious threat to long-term sustainability.
“There is an urgent need for Nigeria to create fiscal space for sustainable social safety-net programming,” the report stressed.
However, the World Bank acknowledged that the NASSP has produced the most measurable results. Among its beneficiaries, the poverty rate dropped by 4.3 percentage points, and the poverty gap shrank by 4.2 points — nearly ten times higher than the combined impact of other welfare initiatives.
The report also commended Nigeria’s National Social Registry, which currently contains data on more than 85 million individuals, describing it as a strong platform for transparent and well-targeted interventions if properly funded and expanded.
