ISSN 2360-798X
Abstract
Accepted 24th July, 2015
The study examined poverty status of rural smallholder sesame farmers in Jigawa State. Multistage sampling technique was used to select 172 respondents for the study. Descriptive statistics, P-alpha measures of poverty (Head Count Index Po, Poverty Gap P1, and Squared Poverty Gap Index P2) model was used as data analysis tools. Primary data were collected from the respondents using structured questionnaires. The result for age distribution indicated that 33.1% of the respondents fall within 31-40 years. The mean age was 38 years .The result further shows that all respondents were male and 86% of the respondents were married. The result for educational background of the respondents shows that 31.4% had secondary education. The result for household size indicated that 36% of the respondents had between 5 to 10 persons in their household with mean of 7. The result for poverty status by all age shows that 52.3% of respondents were below poverty line with P1 and P2 values of 0.162 and 0.026 respectively. The result also shows that incidence of poverty was very high (100%) for respondents with no access to education. The study therefore concludes that poverty status has declined in the study areas however the poverty incidence in the study area was still high. Therefore it is recommended that poverty reduction efforts among rural smallholder sesame farmers should be directed toward increasing better access to quality education and reproductive health issues awareness.
Keywords: Poverty status, rural smallholder, sesame farmers, Jigawa State, Nigeria.