Some 20% of Nigeria’s workers lost jobs to COVID
Al Jazeera
New report shows how COVID-19 has had a disproportionate socioeconomic impact on Africa’s most populous country.
A new report published on Tuesday offers a grim assessment of how the COVID-19 pandemic has roiled Nigeria’s economy and had an uneven impact across both the formal and informal sectors.
The report – a joint research effort by the United Nations Development Programme and Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics – offers a detailed ledger of the pandemic’s disproportionate socioeconomic fallout on Africa’s most populous nation.
“Wealthier nations can afford to institute the crippling lockdowns and restrictions necessary at times to arrest the spread of the virus, and to support their populations so they can stay at home in an effort to limit community spread,” said the executive summary of the report. “Many developing countries however were often forced to rely on a mishmash of truncated measures to limit the fallout on populations already living in poverty or who rely on daily work for subsistence.”