Effect Of Community -Based Participatory Approach On Rural Communities Environmental Knowledge, Attitude And Practices In Oyo State, Nigeria

Purpose: This study, examined the effect of a Community-Based Participatory Approach (CBPA) on environmental knowledge, attitude and practices of rural communities' inhabitants in Oyo State, Nigeria. It was embarked upon to reveal the desirability of involving people at the community level in the environmental management as a means of enhancing their environmental knowledge, attitudes and practices. It is well documented that inhabitants of rural communities often exhibit low knowledge of and poor attitude towards the environment, a situation that diminishes quality of human life. Methodology: The pretest-posttest, control group, quasi-experimental design with 2x2x2 factorial matrix was adopted. Four local government areas were purposively selected. Two rural communities were then selected from each local government areas, using stratified random sampling technique. Forty (40) members of Community Development Associations (CDAs) who reside in selected rural communities and whose age ranges between 25-55years were purposively selected from designed rural communities in four (04) local government areas of Oyo State. The participants were randomly assigned to CBPA (experimental) and direct teaching method (control) groups. Treatment lasted eight weeks. Findings: Treatment had a significant main effect on participants' environmental knowledge (F(1.126) = 88.04; ŋ2 = 0.98) but none on attitude and practices. Participants in the CBPA group had a higher posttest environmental score ( = 23.58) than their counterparts in the control group ( = 10.57). Participants with high level education had slightly higher environmental attitude ( = 60.48) than those with low-level education ( = 59.34). There was no significant main effect of gender on participants' environmental knowledge, attitude and practices. Level of education was not significant on participants' environmental knowledge, attitude and practices. The two-way interaction effects of treatment and gender on participants' environmental knowledge, attitude and practices were not significant. The three-way interaction effect of treatment, gender and level of education was significant on participants' environmental attitude (F(1.126) = 4.44; ŋ2 = 0.03). Higher attitude score was recorded for low-level education males ( = 62.72) compared with their high-level education counterparts ( = 62.00) while high-level education females had higher attitude ( = 65.09) than low-level education females ( = 64.73). Based on the findings of the study, it is recommended that more health personnel should be recruited in the rural communities to monitor environmental sanitation with an enhanced communal effort in solving environmental problems. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The sudy provides empirical evidence on the impact of the Community-Based Paricipatory Approach on the people of rural communities towards maintenance and sustainance of healthy environment.