ISSN 2360-7963
Abstract
Accepted 29th October, 2016.
This study examined the analysis of livelihood diversification on the poverty status of cassava farmers in Ogun State, Nigeria. The data used in the study were collected from 180 households that were randomly selected from 3 Local Government Areas of the State. Descriptive statistics and Tobit regression model were used to analyze the data. Result from the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents shows that respondents were relatively old in age where about 45.1 percent of them were 50 years and above, and 92.5 percent of them were married. About 51.9 percent had between 5 and 7 persons as their household size while 61.7 percent of them indicated less than or equal to 2 hectares of land as their farm size. It was reported that 69.1 percent of the respondents had secondary education and above, indicating that the respondents were fairly educated while only 23.3 percent of them had more than 10 years of farming experience. Their major primary occupation was farming as 71.4 percent of them reported. The result further reveals that civil service, trading, artisanal jobs, commercial motor driving, labour wage, okada riding and rental service were the other livelihood activities available in the study area. The poverty line was taken as the 2/3 of the yearly per capita income and thus the number of households below the poverty line was 67, that is, 37.2 percent of the respondents while the non-poor was 113 or 62.8 percent of the respondents. The daily per capita income was ₦534.2 and the yearly per capita income was ₦194983.2 while the 2/3 yearly per capita income or poverty line was ₦129988.8. The determinants of livelihood activities adopted by the cassava farming households in the study area as shown by Tobit regression estimate revealed that age, household size, farm size and educational level were statistically significant, implying that they are important variables found to greatly influence the livelihood activities adoption by cassava producing farmers in Ogun State. It is therefore recommended that major attention should be given to education and birth control as poverty alleviation strategy in rural settings and access to higher returns non-farm jobs should be encouraged to boost their income.
Keywords: Livelihood diversification, Poverty status, Cassava farmers and Tobit regression analysis