Only about 14.8 per cent of Nigerians are effectively covered by social protection, meaning roughly 85.2 per cent of the population has no reliable cushion against poverty and economic shocks, the International Labour Organisation said in Abuja on Monday.
The figure was disclosed by the ILO Country Director for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Dr Vanessa Phala, at the National Social Protection Statistics Dialogue and Data Collection Engagement. The event was organised by the ILO with the National Bureau of Statistics, the European Union and UNICEF.
The 14.8 per cent coverage estimate is not new. It is drawn from the ILO’s 2024 World Social Protection Report, which the agency and its partners have cited through the current project cycle. What Monday’s engagement added was a push to build the data systems needed to track that gap more precisely at state and local level, rather than a fresh national measurement.
Phala said the number stood for real households rather than an abstract statistic. “Effective coverage in Nigeria stands at 14.8 per cent,” she said. “Behind this figure are real families: mothers, workers in the informal economy, persons with disabilities, and children who remain vulnerable to economic shocks.”
She said closing the gap would require government and other stakeholders to move beyond broad estimates and develop a statistical system able to identify who is covered, who is excluded, and where intervention is most urgent. According to her, policy cannot rest on assumptions, and reliable, timely and disaggregated data is essential to improving delivery.
The coverage shortfall sits against a wider picture of hardship. The ILO has separately noted that around 40 per cent of Nigerians live below the national poverty line, while many more remain exposed to economic, social and climate related shocks. Set beside that, a system reaching fewer than one in six people leaves the majority to absorb rising living costs on their own.
Phala said the ILO, through the European Union funded Supporting Sustainable Social Protection Systems in Nigeria project, known as SUSI, was working with the NBS to strengthen how social protection statistics are generated, coordinated and used. She said the initiative, which first covered Abia, Benue, Oyo and Sokoto states, was now being expanded to all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
The aim, she said, is to equip state statistical offices to collect, analyse and harmonise the data, so that national figures capture what is happening at state and local government levels. Stronger sub national data, she added, would help Nigeria understand regional disparities, identify excluded groups and improve reporting on Sustainable Development Goal indicator 1.3.1, which measures the share of the population covered by social protection.
She also said the exercise would support a national Social Protection Statistics Bulletin to expose coverage gaps, guide resource allocation and improve links between state registers, the National Social Register and other management information systems.
The Statistician General of the Federation, Semiu Adeniran, said the dialogue came as Nigeria’s social protection landscape was undergoing significant transition. He said the government was taking steps to strengthen national ownership, coordination, financing and delivery of poverty reduction interventions.
Adeniran said the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction was advancing a more integrated approach through what he called a “One Humanitarian, One Poverty Response System”, intended to move the country away from fragmented programmes towards a coordinated national structure. He said the NBS had a responsibility to ensure that reforms were backed by reliable, comparable and disaggregated data.
He said work was ongoing to establish a Social Protection Management Information System to bring together data currently held by different institutions. Nigeria, he argued, must stop treating social protection data as occasional reporting and instead build sustainable systems and regular data flows.
Adeniran called for stronger coordination at the ward level, noting that the NBS’s recent ward demarcation exercise offered a foundation for more disaggregated planning. He clarified that the goal was not a new large scale survey for every programme in every ward, but a ward level data layer drawn from information already held across government and complemented by targeted collection.
Representing the EU Delegation, Chioma Osuji said effective planning was impossible without credible data. “When we say we want to reduce poverty and we don’t know how many people are poor, the level of vulnerability, we can hardly come up with programmes that would be able to help us address the reduction of poverty,” she said.
She urged participating institutions to set up practical mechanisms for routine data sharing, validation and accountability, and backed the proposed Social Protection Statistics Bulletin Committee as a way to sustain coordination. The EU, ILO and UNICEF have continued to support Nigeria’s efforts to extend coverage to vulnerable groups and informal economy workers.