Nigeria: Challenges to changing the feminine face of poverty in Nigeria

Seventy per cent of those living in absolute poverty in our world – starving or on the edge of starvation – are female. All over the world, women and children are the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor. In Nigeria, as in many other developing countries, the new face of poverty is woman. This has become an economic phenomenon as the gap between women and men caught in the cycle of poverty has continued to widen in the past decade, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘the feminisation of poverty’. This underscores the fact that where an issue affects (negatively) both men and women, in most cases women suffer more than men. In the situation of single parenting for instance, families headed by women are poorer compared with those headed by men.