Child Poverty in Rural Nigeria

Abstract

Children are the most susceptible to poverty and it often directly affects them through access to sanitation, education, health, water, food and shelter. Poverty among them is however usually assessed using indicators such as income and expenditure which often do not reveal the extent of deprivation among them. This study investigates the extent of poverty among under five children in rural Nigeria and its distribution across household wealth status. The study used the 2013 DHS data. The Alkire and Foster counting approach was used to generate poverty profiles among the children while descriptive statistics was used to assess their distribution. The results revealed a significant level of poverty among the children and poor children were found in all classes of household poverty. The North-west and North-east had highest proportion of non poor children from extremely poor and moderately poor households, respectively while the South-south had the highest proportion of extremely poor and moderately poor children from non poor households. The study recommended that specific policies targeting deprivations suffered by children should be used to address child poverty.

Keywords: Rural Households; Child poverty index; deprivation intensity; Alkire and Foster counting approach