A damning new World Bank report has revealed that Nigeria’s social safety-net programmes are failing spectacularly, with 56% of benefits missing their intended targets among the nation’s poor despite billions of naira spent annually on poverty alleviation.
The November 2025 report, “The State of Social Safety Nets in Nigeria,” exposes how poor targeting, inadequate funding and flawed programme design have rendered most government interventions ineffective in combating poverty.
According to the report, while 56% of social programme beneficiaries are genuinely poor, they receive only 44% of total benefits. This alarming inefficiency stems from fundamental design flaws – most programmes, including the National Social Safety Nets Programme, provide fixed amounts per household rather than per individual.
This approach disproportionately harms larger poor families, who must stretch the same benefit amount across more household members than smaller, potentially better-off families receiving identical support.
The World Bank noted that programmes targeting individuals rather than households, like the National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme, avoid this pitfall. However, the school feeding scheme remains limited to pupils in grades one to three without full national coverage, drastically restricting its impact.
Nigeria’s social protection spending stands at a meager 0.14% of GDP, far below the global average of 1.5% and the Sub-Saharan African average of 1.1%. This inadequate investment has produced “almost no impact” on poverty, with all social programmes combined reducing the national poverty headcount by just 0.4 percentage points.
The report also highlighted Nigeria’s dangerous dependence on donor funding, with official development assistance accounting for about 60% of federal safety-net spending between 2015 and 2021. The World Bank alone provided over 90% of this support, creating sustainability risks.
Amid the grim findings, the National Social Safety Nets Programme emerged as a rare success story. Using the National Social Registry – now Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest social registry with over 85 million individuals – the programme reduced poverty among its beneficiaries by 4.3 percentage points, nearly ten times more effective than other interventions.
The World Bank urged Nigeria to urgently increase domestic funding for social protection and leverage existing platforms like the National Social Registry for more efficient, transparent assistance delivery to those who need it most.
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