The profiles and determinants of child poverty in rural Nigeria were identified using the
Demographic and Health Survey, 2008 data. The multidimensional child poverty concept was
applied to children under-5 years of age. In all, a total of 4,543 children were analyzed. About half
of the children were male and the mean age for all the children is 29 months old.
A single step Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) was carried out to generate
weights for five dimensions used in the multidimensional poverty estimations. These dimensions
are safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, health and nutrition. The Alkire and Foster (2007)
counting approach was applied to generate multidimensional poverty profiles for the children.
When the poverty cut off K=1, 52% of the children were multidimensional poor as against 27.9%
poor when k=3.This implies that when children are deprived in at least one dimension, 52% are
multidimensional poor. The health and sanitation dimensions had the highest relative contribution
of 38.54% and 22.58% respectively to the overall multidimensional poverty index .