Written by Anna Herforth, Olutayo Adeyemi, Joyce Akpata, Rachel Gilbert, and William Masters
Monitoring the Cost of a Healthy Diet
In January of this year, the Nigeria National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) started monitoring the Cost of a Healthy Diet using their own monthly retail food price data. NBS publishes a monthly bulletin on the CoHD, most recently in June 2024.
The Cost of a Healthy Diet is defined as the minimum amount required to purchase a diet that meets food-based dietary guidelines. The number of people who cannot afford this cost is counted annually by FAO and the World Bank. These numbers are reported globally in UN flagship report The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) reports published by FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO.
Last week in Nigeria, the Cost of a Healthy Diet was leveraged to raise the minimum wage, to more than double what it had been.
One article describes how the CoHD featured heavily in the negotiations:
"Last week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signed the new Minimum Wage Bill into law while commending the National Assembly for prompt passage of the bill. The federal government and the organised labour recently agreed on N70,000 as Nigeria’s new minimum wage. The president promptly forwarded the bill to the National Assembly and demanded swift passage.
The new minimum wage is a record 134 per cent increase on the previous minimum wage of N30,000. It would be reviewed every three years.
With food inflation surging along at 40.8 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released figures on the cost of a healthy diet per person per day that showed that N1,041 was needed to provide a healthy meal per day for one person.
The NBS figure which was released a few days before the agreement on N70,000 as new minimum wage was reached, lent credence to labour leaders’ demand for N250,000 as new minimum wage. It showed that more than N31,000 was needed for feeding one person in a month.
However, the labour leaders were convinced that with the abysmal productivity in the economy, a minimum wage of N250,000 could devastate the economy.
They grudgingly accepted N70,000 even as they knew that it bordered on starving wage."
Abdullahim, 6 Aug 2024, Bluprint.org
Broader implications for food and agriculture policy
The 2024 SOFI reports that upwards of 79% of Nigerians cannot afford a healthy diet. This is a major contributor to the global count, with Nigeria as such a populous country of over 230 million people.
The Cost of Healthy Diet indicator, first developed in 2015 through an IMMANA grant, is part of the ongoing Food Prices for Nutrition project. This initiative is a collaboration between Tufts University, the World Bank, and the International Food Policy Research Institute. It was at an Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health (ANH) Academy Week that Nigerian partners and the Food Prices for Nutrition team first met to form a collaboration to track the Cost of a Healthy Diet in Nigeria.
The CoHD data underscores the need to reassess food and agriculture policies, including investment in diversified production and market connectivity to bring down the cost of non-staple foods like vegetables, fruits, animal-source foods, legumes, nuts and seeds. In Nigeria, these food groups account for two-thirds of the Cost of a Healthy Diet and are patently under-consumed. The immediate policy impact of the findings in Nigeria has been on setting a living wage, a move that may help millions to eat better tomorrow. We applaud the use of a nutrition-sensitive indicator for poverty alleviation, as it is a commendable step towards achieving the ultimate goal of better nutrition for all.
