Nigeria recorded the largest increase in the number of people living in multidimensional poverty among countries where poverty rose, according to the 2026 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Here is what the report measures, what it found, and how to read the numbers.

What Is Multidimensional Poverty?

Multidimensional poverty is poverty that goes beyond income. A person is counted as poor not only if they earn too little, but if they go without several basic things at once: education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation and access to basic services such as electricity and clean water.

The idea is that two people with the same income can live very different lives. One may have a school, a clinic and running water nearby. The other may have none.

How Is It Measured?

The global MPI looks at three dimensions: health, education and standard of living. It tracks 10 indicators:

• Health: nutrition and child mortality
• Education: years of schooling and school attendance
• Standard of living: cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing and household assets

A person is classed as multidimensionally poor if their household is deprived in at least one-third of these indicators, which are weighted. The index then combines two things: how many people are poor (incidence) and how deprived they are on average (intensity). Multiply the two and you get the MPI value.

Of the countries that could be compared over time, five recorded an increase: Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria. Nigeria had the largest increase in the number of people affected.

What Happened in Nigeria?

• Poverty rate: 38.7 percent in 2024, up from 33 percent in 2021.
• People affected: 90.1 million in 2024, up from 72.2 million, an additional 17.9 million.
• MPI value: 0.208 in 2024, up from 0.175 in 2021.
• Intensity: 53.6 percent in 2024, up from 52.9 percent. Poor Nigerians were deprived in slightly more areas of life, on average.

The rise reversed earlier gains. Nigeria’s poverty rate fell from 42.3 percent in 2013 to 37.2 percent in 2018 and 33 percent in 2021, before climbing again.

Not Every Part of Nigeria Is the Same

The report found a very wide gap between regions. Multidimensional poverty incidence runs from 3.7 percent in some parts of the country to 88.3 percent in others. It compares Yobe and Sokoto, which have similar MPI values, to show that communities can be equally poor overall but deprived in different ways. In one, the main gap might be schooling. In another, it might be sanitation or fuel. That is why the report says policymakers should look at individual indicators, not just the headline number.

What the Numbers Do Not Tell Us

• They are not 2026 figures. Nigeria’s estimate is based on 2024 survey data. It does not measure poverty today.
• They do not name one cause. The period from 2021 to 2024 covers more than one administration and several economic shocks. The figures show that poverty rose, not why.
• They are not the same as Nigeria’s national poverty figure. The National Bureau of Statistics’ own national MPI, based on a 2021/22 survey, put the rate at 63 percent, or about 133 million people. That index uses different indicators and a different threshold, so the two numbers should not be compared with each other.

The Global Picture

Across the 108 countries covered, 1.2 billion people live in multidimensional poverty, about 18.9 percent of those measured. This is 51.5 million more than in the last update and the first increase since the index began in 2010. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate, with 616 million people, or 51.4 percent of its population, in poverty. Children make up more than half of the world’s multidimensionally poor.

The report also offers some hope. Of 89 countries with comparable data, 33 have cut their MPI value by at least half in under 15 years, including six in sub-Saharan Africa.

Income figures can improve while daily life does not. A household that has no electricity, no clean water or a child out of school is poor in ways that a growth rate does not capture. For Nigeria, the report is a reminder to measure progress by who has access to basic services, and where.