The share of minimum wage needed to afford a healthy diet fell from 124.1% in June to 54.2% in July 2024, when the minimum wage was increased from ₦30,000 to ₦70,000.
Before July, the cost of a healthy diet for a month exceeded 100% of [the] minimum wage, making it unaffordable for minimum-wage earners.
The sharpest burden was recorded in June 2024, when households needed their full salary plus 24% extra to eat healthily.
Between July and December, affordability worsened slightly from 54.2% to 64.1%, indicating that food prices continued to rise despite the wage boost.
The implementation of the ₦70,000 minimum wage in 2024 provided significant relief to Nigerian households struggling with the high cost of eating healthily.
Food prices rose roughly 13.9% from January to August 2025, according to the rebased Consumer Price Index (CPI) from the National Bureau of Statistics.
Month-on-month inflation for food fluctuated, with some months seeing sharper increases than others.
Using January as a baseline, the purchasing power of money for food declined steadily, meaning households need more naira to buy the same items.
Food carries a large weight in the CPI basket, making it a major driver of overall inflation and cost-of-living increases.
Among the 113 countries measured in the 2022 Global Food Security Index, Nigeria is ranked 107th overall, putting it deep in the bottom ten globally.
Nigeria has the lowest affordability score globally in the GFSI 2022, scoring only 25.0 in that pillar.
The country performs marginally better in other pillars: its score in “Quality and Safety” is relatively higher (55.6), and “Sustainability and Adaptation” is 53.7. But other pillars like “Availability” (39.5) remain weak.
Globally, a group of countries, including Nigeria, DR Congo, Sudan, Venezuela, Burundi, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Haiti, and Syria, all cluster at low overall GFSI scores (below ~45), reflecting severe challenges.
India tops the list of the global number of people unable to afford a decent meal with a value of 792.80 million causing unaffordability to prevail in the country by 55.6%.
China emerged as the second country in this global list with 208.10 million people falling in this category and unaffordability prevalence of 14.6%.
Nigeria claimed 6.2% of the global total with 175.6M, making it the 3rd country with the highest number of healthy diet unaffordability.
High number of people that could not afford a healthy diet does not outrightly equal high percentage of healthy diet unaffordability.
