Poverty in Nigeria is chronic and on a continuous rise. The total population of the country's citizens living below the $1 a day threshold is on the increase despite the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in recent years. The ineffective implementation of the various poverty alleviation policies has hindered the investment opportunities in education, health, agriculture, and the economy that would ordinarily increase the citizens' productivity. In Malaysia for instance as far back as the 1970s, it developed its poverty line after making poverty eradication the top priority of the government's national policy and using the assessments of the minimum consumption level of an average household basic needs of life such as shelter, food, clothing and other non-food needs (Hatta, & Ali, 2013). The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Malaysia was worth 364.70 billion US dollars in 2019, according to official data from the World Bank (Trading Economic, 2020). It shows an increase since the past 10 years where the GDP in 2010 was 295.95 billion US dollar. Now, the GDP value of Malaysia represents 0.30 percent of the world economy. Malaysia's economy registered a growth of 4.3% in 2019, 0.4% better than previous year (2018:4.7%). Looking at the data however, the unemployment rate in Malaysia climbed to 4.8 percent in November 2020 from 3.2 percent in the corresponding month of the previous year, amid the severe impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of unemployed jumped 48.7 percent from a year earlier to 764.4 thousand, while employment declined by 0.8 percent to 15.20 million. Meantime, the labor force rose 0.8 percent to 15.96 million. In October 2020, the jobless rate was at 4.7 percent (Department of Statistics in Malaysia, 2020).

Keywords: Poverty Alleviation; Policy; Developing Countries.