A new National Poverty Intelligence Lab has been launched by the federal government to confront the plight of an estimated 140 million Nigerians living below the poverty line.

Set up with Innovations for Poverty Action, the data driven platform is designed to sharpen targeting, monitoring and evaluation of anti-poverty programs. It was opened in Abuja by Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction Minister Bernard Doro, who said the country could no longer lean on guesswork and scattered interventions.

Doro described the scale of need as staggering yet beatable, and said what the moment called for was evidence driven leadership and coordinated, accountable action rather than more of the same. He cast the lab as the analytical core of Nigeria’s poverty reduction effort, supplying the basis for policy, program design and spending decisions.

The platform, he explained, would underpin the One Humanitarian One Poverty Response System, a framework meant to draw humanitarian aid, social protection and poverty programs into a single structure, with the aim of moving households permanently out of vulnerability.

Innovations for Poverty Action’s country representative, Fumi Ayeni, said working with the ministry would help officials grasp the needs of vulnerable populations and cut duplication, while ministerial adviser Abimbola Fasanu stressed that reliable data should be treated as a national asset.