Social Policies and Poverty Reduction in Africa: Nigeria in focus

One of the daunting challenges in the development of human capital and the general wellbeing of the people is the rising incidence of poverty across regions. Many policies and strategies have been adopted to address this challenge. In this paper, we explore all such social policies adopted to tackle poverty incidence in Africa using Nigeria as a focal point. In particular, we reviews nine social policies employed by the Nigerian government to reduced poverty in Nigeria and accesses their outcomes. Our outcome expresses mixed feelings on the performance of social policies in poverty reduction in Nigeria. Specifically, while implementers advocate for successes of the programmes, the beneficiaries pointed to non-effectiveness of the programmes due to noticeable challenges peculiar to the sub region. However, the African sub-region, including Nigeria, benefits fully from conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes of social policies across poverty line and multi-dimensions in dipping poverty across all strata of the African society. We recommend strengthening social policy integration among competing policies as an onion in ensuring social policies-poverty reduction synthesis in the African region.