Vulnerability And Poverty Transitions Among Rural Households In South West Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Successive governments in Nigeria have implemented poverty alleviation

programmes and strategies without commensurate reduction in poverty. The near

failure of these programmes and strategies has been associated with improper diagnosis

of poverty as a static rather than dynamic concept. Poverty dynamics enables a better

appreciation of the extent of poverty over time by distinguishing between households

exiting and entering into poverty, those never poor and the persistently poor. The

dynamics of and vulnerability to poverty in rural Southwest Nigeria (SWN) were

therefore investigated.

Primary data were collected from a two-wave panel survey (harvesting and lean

periods) employing a multi-stage sampling technique. The first stage was a random

selection of Oyo and Osun states. Thereafter, was the random selection of three Local

Government Areas (LGAs) from each state. Ten rural Enumeration Areas (EAs) were

randomly selected from each LGA and ten households were systematically selected

from each EA. In all, 600 households were interviewed in the Harvesting Period (HAP)

out of which 582 could be tracked in the Lean Period (LEP) which constituted the

sample size. The sample was weighted using the inverse of the overall selection

probabilities to make it representative of the region. Information was collected on

socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, monthly consumption expenditure as

well as economic infrastructure available in the respondents’ communities. Data were

analysed using descriptive statistics, Foster, Greer and Thorbecke poverty measure, 3-

Stage Feasible Generalized Least Squares, Tobit, Probit and Multinomial Logit

regression methods.

A higher proportion of the households (79.6%) were headed by males. The

mean age and household size of the respondents were 50.8 ± 15.3 years and 5.0 ± 3.3

respectively. The mean per capita household consumption expenditure at HAP was

N4970.36 ± N3274.25, while that of LEP was N6140.43 ± N5113.94 with poverty lines

of N3313.57 and N4093.21 respectively. The incidence of poverty was 35.0% for HAP

and 43.6% for LEP. At the standard vulnerability threshold of 0.5, 55.7% of rural

households in SWN were vulnerable to poverty. A unit increase in household size and

dependency ratio aggravated vulnerability by 0.05 and 1.28, while attainment of

iv

secondary and tertiary education reduced (p