Nigeria - Targeting Communities for Effective Poverty Alleviation

An important finding from analyzing the
survey data from the poverty assessment study on Nigeria is
the concentration of the poor in communities in which most
of the other households are also poor, and the tendency of
the non-poor households to reside in communities in which
the population is largely non-poor. As a result, the overall
income inequality in the country is due largely to income
inequality between communities and much less to income
inequality between households within communities. To
illustrate this concentration of the poor and the non-poor
in separate communities, all the communities that were
included in the household expenditure survey were divided
into four categories according to two criteria: first, the
share of poor households in the community and second, the
average per capita income of all the households in the
community. Although the sample for each community is very
small, all the conclusions have been drawn for the entire
category of communities in which the size of the sample was adequate.