Poverty mitigation in Nigeria: The role of human capital investment and institutions

Despite the enormous resource wealth and human capital of Nigeria, poverty has become endemic among its population. Thus, this paper assessed the role of human capital investment and institutions in mitigating poverty in Nigeria between 1990 and 2023. By employing the autoregressive distributed lag technique, the paper demonstrated that human capital has a weak effect on decelerating poverty levels in the country. Specifically, while public investment in education and health has no significant long-term impacts on poverty, an increase in employment significantly reduces poverty levels for Nigeria. Conversely, institutions were found to aid the rising trend of poverty in the country, with dysfunctionality in government effectiveness and politically motivated violence being significantly responsible. Thus, the study recommends an increase in funding for the health and educational sectors and an enabling environment for sophisticated manpower investment to further boost income levels against poverty incidences. Also, the dysfunctionality in the institutional workings of the country will need to be tamed before the dividends of governance can effectively tackle poverty.