PUSH Africa, a civil society organisation (CSO) in Nigeria, has called on politicians in the country to focus on creating more jobs to halt the spread of poverty.

Founder of PUSH Africa, Doris Egbaramen, made the call at the start of the ‘Do-One-Thing’ initiative, which aims to promote socio-economic justice for the poor.

According to Egbaramen, the creation of more jobs could be achieved through the development of people-oriented programmes and policies.

Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose from 27.1 percent in the second quarter of 2020 to 33 percent in the first quarter of 2021, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows.

Also, data from the World Bank shows that four in ten Nigerians live below the national poverty line.

‘As political activities towards next year’s elections heat up, prospective leaders who are aspiring to vie for various political offices should give priority attention to the raging increase in the number of poor people in the country’, she said.

‘They should show the Nigerian people that they have a practical and actionable plan to tackle pervasive and deepening poverty in their various constituencies.

‘This current situation is disturbing and if we are not intentional about this issue, the statistics will get worse and the consequences in terms of negative socio-economic impact and underdevelopment will keep getting worse.

‘For the sake of the current and future generations, we cannot allow this to happen’.

While acknowledging the government’s efforts in addressing poverty, she said that there was a need to assess the current efforts to understand why poverty numbers are still growing.

PUSH AFRICA is a pan-African CSO that aims to reduce poverty and unemployment in Nigeria and West African states by promoting entrepreneurship, skill acquisition and agricultural development programmes amongst women and youths.

Photo source: Rhealyz Naija