Nigeria’s reform programme, he said, had been under way for about three years, underscoring the need to sustain economic reforms while expanding targeted interventions for households struggling with the cost of living.

“We will continue to do what is needed and what is necessary to make sure that our households are supported through this phase of growth,” Doro said.

He added that government interventions would be sustained and adjusted to respond to economic and humanitarian shocks affecting vulnerable populations.

Doro said the government was reforming the country’s social protection architecture to move beyond short-term relief measures towards programmes that could help vulnerable Nigerians achieve economic independence.

Under the proposed “One Humanitarian, One Poverty Response System,” the ministry intends to connect humanitarian assistance, social protection and poverty reduction programmes within a coordinated framework.

The minister said Nigeria had implemented numerous interventions over the years but had struggled to coordinate them effectively and measure their direct impact on beneficiaries.

According to him, the challenge is not necessarily a shortage of interventions or development funding, but the absence of an integrated system capable of ensuring that programmes complement one another and deliver measurable results.

The proposed framework is designed to identify vulnerable individuals and households, provide immediate support to stabilise their circumstances and subsequently help them transition from vulnerability to self-reliance.

Doro said the approach would establish a pathway for beneficiaries to graduate from poverty rather than remain dependent on repeated relief interventions.

He explained that the government intended to strengthen coordination among relevant ministries, state governments and development partners to improve the delivery of social protection programmes.

The ministry also plans to establish a digital architecture linking different programme delivery systems, allowing government agencies to share information and coordinate interventions more effectively.

“When everybody is doing their own thing and these things are not talking to each other, the systems are not interoperable, it becomes very difficult,” he said.

Doro identified institutionalising the reforms, operationalising the poverty exit pathway and systematically tracking poverty reduction programmes as priorities for the coming year.

He said these measures would help the government determine whether interventions were reaching intended beneficiaries and whether they were producing meaningful improvements in household welfare.

Abubakar Suleiman, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Sterling Bank, said macroeconomic stability was essential to improving household welfare, arguing that persistent inflation effectively reduces the purchasing power of Nigerians even when their nominal incomes remain unchanged.

He said a household facing 30 percent inflation could suffer a substantial loss in purchasing power without taking any action, making inflation control one of the most important responsibilities of government.

“The worst thing that happens to a household is that if they do nothing, when you have a 30 percent inflation, when you do nothing, you lose 30 percent of your income,” Suleiman said.

He argued that the benefits of stabilising prices should not be underestimated, even when households cannot immediately perceive improvements in their financial circumstances.

Suleiman also said macroeconomic stability was necessary to attract investment and create the jobs required to improve household incomes over time.

Investors, he explained, needed greater predictability in prices and confidence that they could repatriate investment proceeds before committing capital to the economy.

However, he cautioned against expecting such reforms to translate into immediate household gains, stressing that government would need to complement them with direct interventions for vulnerable populations.

The Sterling Bank chief executive said the private sector also had a responsibility to support inclusive development rather than focus exclusively on conventional profit maximisation.

He argued that the economic circumstances facing Nigeria required businesses to adopt approaches that recognised their wider responsibilities to society.

According to him, commercial banks and other private organisations should incorporate development finance into their operations, including investments in sectors that may not generate the highest immediate financial returns but are critical to long-term economic development.

Suleiman cited Sterling Bank’s 10-year strategy focused on healthcare, education, agriculture, renewable energy and transport, known as the HATS strategy.

He said the proportion of the bank’s balance sheet devoted to the five sectors had increased from less than five percent to 25 percent.

Agriculture alone accounted for 16 percent of the bank’s total balance sheet, he said, despite not being among its most profitable segments.

Suleiman said the strategy reflected the need for businesses to support sectors that could expand economic opportunities, strengthen household incomes and create the conditions for sustainable commercial growth.

He urged Nigerian businesses to recognise that their long-term profitability depended partly on the economic and social conditions in which they operated.

The Sterling Bank chief executive also called on profitable Nigerian institutions to commit a proportion of their profits to impact investment, arguing that conventional private capital and government funding alone might not adequately address the country’s development challenges.

He said private capital was largely driven by financial returns, while public investment was subject to competing social and policy considerations that could limit its direct economic impact.

Impact investment, he argued, could help bridge the gap by supporting projects that generate measurable social benefits while maintaining a degree of financial sustainability.

Suleiman said Nigeria should pay greater attention to domestic sources of impact capital rather than depend predominantly on international development finance.

Such funding, he explained, could support opportunities that conventional investors might initially consider too risky or insufficiently profitable, thereby helping create conditions for additional private investment.

He stressed that impact investment was not intended to replace government funding, bilateral development assistance or conventional private capital, but to complement them by financing projects with longer investment horizons and broader development benefits.

“Every institution that makes profit out of this country ought to commit a percentage of its profit to impact investment,” he said.

He maintained that businesses that failed to invest in the environment from which they generated profits could ultimately undermine their own future growth.

Kalpana Kochhar, Interim President of Global Policy and Advocacy at the Gates Foundation, said Nigeria needed to treat healthcare and education as investments in productive capacity rather than merely as social expenditure.

Speaking virtually at the summit, Kochhar said healthier and better-educated populations were more productive, earned higher incomes over their lifetimes and were better equipped to adapt to economic changes and external shocks.

She cited the experience of East Asian economies, including South Korea and Taiwan, which made substantial progress in primary education and healthcare before advancing their industrial development.

These investments included sanitation, immunisation, malaria control, and maternal and child healthcare, she said.

Kochhar argued that Nigeria’s development strategy should similarly recognise human capital as a prerequisite for sustained economic transformation.

However, she said increasing budgetary allocations to health and education would not be sufficient unless governments also ensured that funds were fully utilised and essential services reached intended beneficiaries.

She questioned whether approved budgets were being executed in full, whether funding reached service delivery points on time and whether hospitals had the medical supplies and personnel needed to treat patients.

Kochhar said governments should therefore strengthen the systems through which public services were delivered alongside efforts to increase funding.

The Gates Foundation, she explained, focused on supporting innovation in healthcare and agriculture, including vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and improved seeds, with the objective of reducing costs and making successful innovations accessible to more people.

She cited the foundation’s support for the development of a single-dose human papillomavirus vaccine regimen, intended to address the challenge of young people failing to return for a second dose under the previous two-dose schedule.

The programme, she said, had helped improve the prospects of reaching more people with vaccination and was also being rolled out in Nigeria.

Kochhar further cited an artificial intelligence-powered agricultural advisory application deployed in India’s Maharashtra state, which helps farmers identify crop diseases and obtain agricultural guidance.

The application had reached between 700,000 and 800,000 farmers at a reported cost of about 18 US cents per farmer, she said, offering a potentially more affordable alternative to conventional agricultural extension services.

She said similar innovations could help Nigerian farmers improve productivity and access technical support at lower costs.

Kochhar also called for Nigeria to complement traditional macroeconomic indicators, including gross domestic product growth, with a more focused system for measuring changes in household prosperity.

She said GDP growth provided important information about the size and performance of an economy but did not sufficiently explain who was benefiting from that growth.

She proposed a household prosperity dashboard that would track real household incomes, consumption, food affordability, job creation and the ability of families to withstand economic shocks.

The dashboard, she said, should also measure the quality of employment, wage levels, labour productivity and access to opportunities that allow workers to move into more productive sectors.

Other indicators should cover health outcomes, nutrition, educational attainment and access to essential services, as well as women’s participation in the economy and the ability of poor households and smallholder farmers to build assets and increase their incomes.

Kochhar said the indicators should be disaggregated by gender, geography and income to help policymakers identify disparities and respond more effectively to the needs of different population groups.

She also called for a clearer system to trace public resources from revenue collection and budget allocation through expenditure and service delivery to measurable human development outcomes.

Such an approach, she said, would allow governments to determine whether public spending was translating into better living standards.

Abhishek Singh, Indian High Commissioner to Nigeria, said India’s development experience demonstrated that economic growth alone was insufficient without mechanisms to ensure that its benefits reached individual households.

He said India and Nigeria shared similarities as large democracies with significant populations, making cooperation and the exchange of development experiences particularly relevant.

Singh highlighted India’s direct benefit transfer system, which links bank accounts, biometric identification and mobile phones to deliver government payments directly to beneficiaries.

He said 540 million accounts had been linked to the system and that approximately $400 billion had been transferred directly to households.

The system, he said, had helped reduce leakages by 40 percent by limiting the role of intermediaries in the distribution of government benefits.

Singh also highlighted India’s digital payments infrastructure, which he said supported about 15 billion transactions monthly and enabled small businesses, including vegetable vendors, to receive digital payments.

He argued that comparable digital payment, credit and logistics systems could help Nigerian informal businesses expand their markets, formalise transactions and increase household incomes.

Nigeria’s more than 109 million internet users, he said, provided a foundation for expanding digital services that could improve access to economic opportunities.

The Indian envoy also highlighted food security interventions, including support for more than 300 million people through free food assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside efforts to expand millet production and improve agricultural practices.

He said reducing agricultural input costs could help lower household food expenditure, particularly in economies where food accounts for a significant share of household spending.

Singh said Nigeria and India could deepen bilateral cooperation in ways that would directly improve household welfare, particularly through trade diversification, local manufacturing, skills development and affordable energy.

He put bilateral trade between the two countries at about $10 billion, noting that it was largely concentrated in Nigerian crude oil exports and Indian pharmaceutical products.

He called for diversification into sectors capable of creating jobs and lowering the cost of essential goods and services.

For instance, he said local production of affordable generic medicines could improve access to healthcare, while cooperation in compressed natural gas could help reduce transportation costs.

He also identified solar energy as an opportunity to lower household electricity expenses, particularly in rural communities.

Singh also called for partnerships that would enable Nigeria to process more of its agricultural products and mineral resources locally rather than rely predominantly on the export of raw materials.

He said Indian processing technologies could support Nigerian small and medium-sized enterprises in areas such as textiles, cashew processing and critical mineral refining.