The Head Corner Stone: Human Centred Policies as Panacea to Poverty in Nigeria

Over the years, Nigeria’s efforts to reduce poverty were unsuccessful. Policies such as the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), prepared in consultation with stakeholders and development partners, including the World Bank and the IMF, with a focus on growth and development towards poverty reduction, were described as failures. The view of this paper is that to develop policies for poverty reduction, the human focus development is a better indicator of growth and development. Based on Nigeria’s performance on human development continuum, the paper hypothesises that anti-poverty policies are deficient and in order to effectively reduce poverty the challenges to human development in the country should be identified and tackled. The paper proposes the use of systems thinking and complexity theory to identify and rank poverty factors. Fifty-three factors were identified from the literature and subsequently reduced to thirty-six. Using NETDRAWR, a network visualization software within UCINETR, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) software, twenty poverty factors were found to be the most central to poverty network. And using the Analytical Network Process (ANP), these twenty factors were ranked to obtain the factors with the highest priority consideration; also called the ‘poverty hub’ factors. Removing these five factors from the poverty network made the network less dense, thus reducing clustering coefficient by about 20%. This indicates that only five factors contribute about 20% of the total poverty condition in Nigeria. Therefore, the paper suggests a pro-poor policy design to eliminate these five poverty hub factors.