Social protection in Nigeria: an overview of programmes and their effectiveness

Social protection as a response to poverty is emerging in Nigeria, supported by government and development partners. Programmes remain extremely small-scale in the context of high numbers of poor people. Building institutional knowledge and capacity will be important to generate political and f inancial support to scale up existing programmes. This Project Briefing discusses the current social protection policy and programming landscape in Nigeria and the effectiveness of social protection in addressing poverty and inequality in the country. It argues that social protection in Nigeria is falling short as a response to the needs of the poor and puts forward a number of policy recommendations for consideration by government and development to strengthen the nascent social protection agenda in the country.