IN 2018, the World Poverty Clock found that six Nigerians fell into extreme poverty every minute. In contrast, five Vietnamese left the poverty cycle each minute in the same year, according to The ICIR analysis of World Bank data.
Forty-five million Vietnamese were lifted out of penury between 2002 and 2018, with poverty rates declining sharply from over 70 percent to below 6 percent, the World Bank said. In 2018, 87 million Nigerians were classified as extremely poor, living on less than $1.90 each day. In fact, Nigeria officially became the world’s poverty capital that year.
There are similarities in both countries, yet differences in policy implementation and economic management and leadership. Like Nigeria, Vietnam’s agriculture contributes one-thirds to its economy. Agriculture also contributes about one-thirds to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), though its total contribution in 2020 was 26.21 percent due to supply chain issues necessitated by COVID-19.
The difference is that the Southeast Asian country converts its raw agricultural products into finished products while Africa’s largest economy ships out raw agricultural products.
“Well, if you add value to your products, you earn more foreign exchange and become rich, but if you export products in raw forms, you earn less and maybe remain poor,” Attah Anzaku, co-founder of Agroeknor, an exporter of hibiscus flower, told The ICIR.
From January to November 2020, Vietnam earned $254 billion from the export of non-oil products such as phones, electronics goods, footwear and textiles, while Nigeria earned less than $3 billion from shipping out raw leather, cocoa powder, sesame, cashew and mainly raw agricultural commodities, which would be converted into finished products and re-exported to Nigeria.
Another similarity is that more than half of both countries’ populations are youths – less than 25-year-olds. The youth in both countries have access to the internet; in Vietnam, 45 percent of young people have access to the internet, but Nigeria only has data for the general population -48 percent in 2020. But with the structure of the population, the majority are said to be young people.
