7 line (Boateng _et al,_ 1992). For instance one-third and two-third of means have been regularly used. In this document we use the latter approach and construct a relative poverty line since there is no absolute poverty line available for Nigeria.

The poverty lines that have been constructed for Nigeria include the following: The International Labor Organization (ILO) under the JASPA study (1982) constructed poverty lines on the basis of 1978 income data which amounted to 65 Naira per month per family in urban area and 35 Naira per month per family in rural areas. The poverty line assumed in the case of urban households 50 Naira per month per family for food and the rest for housing, clothing and the rest, and set the rural prices to be 40 percent below urban level. According to these guidelines it was estimated that 34 percent were poor in urban areas (instead of 15 percent in 1974), while 40 percent were below the poverty line in rural area. The other study is the World Bank Food Security Study of 1989 which draws its results on the basis of unprocessed 1985/86 FOS data.4/ Poverty lines are set at NI 50 for urban and NI 10 for rural using only food expenditures. This leads to 22.2 percent urban households and 17.2 percent of rural households falling below the poverty line or are food insecure, resulting in around 18 percent of all households nationally being poor.

Bevan et al (1988) drew an absolute rural poverty line based on 1952/53 data dividing the bottom 20 percent and 40 percent of the population. They concluded that in 1983/84 there were 17 percent and 58 percent respectively under those lines. This indicates that "moderate" poverty has worsened although the "hard core" poverty has not changed dramatically.

Both UNICEF and ILO have been concerned with developing poverty analyses. The former has been mainly interested in the qualitative side of the poverty analysis, while the latter has done some of the early work on poverty using survey data, as noted above.

In addition, there have been various other small scale studies or revisions of poverty lines which led to different proportions falling below poverty lines. For instance a World Bank(1994) study, constructed a poverty line which was based on earlier studies, and concluded that 57.7 percent of the urban population and 66.2 percent of then rural population lived under poverty.

# **3.4 Basic Needs Approach to Poverty**

As mentioned earlier many studies have attempted to understand poverty through indicators of basic needs. One of the first issues that needs to be resolved is what is covered by "basic needs". In the Nigerian context there have been some lengthy exchange of views among scholars and policy makers on this issue. One of the early definitions of basic needs was put forward by the ILO (1981) entitled "First things First" which included food, water, shelter, health

> 4/ The present analysis is based on the same data set, except that now it is processed, edited and allowance has been made for regional price differences and so forth before the poverty analysis. According to the current estimate 49.5 percent of the rural population and 31.7 percent of the urban population fell below the poverty line, resulting in around 43 percent of the national population being poor. It is worth noting that poor households are much larger than non-poor households and this also contributes to the difference in household versus population percentage under poverty line, apart from the differences in poverty lines used.