Entrepreneurship Development and Poverty Reduction among Rural Women in Nigeria

The purpose of this study is to investigate how entrepreneurship development initiatives affect Nigerian rural women’s ability to escape poverty. Nigeria’s poverty predicament embodies the idea of “feminization of poverty,†as a greater proportion of the impoverished are women. Furthermore, the failure of the current entrepreneurial development programs to increase women’s involvement in entrepreneurship, particularly in rural regions, is a sign that further empirical research is required. All of the female business owners in the rural Oke Ogun region of Oyo state, Nigeria, were the study’s target demographic. A structured questionnaire was employed as a means of gathering data. Because the majority of the women entrepreneurs are illiterate, the researchers individually distributed copies of the questionnaire at random to them at their local stalls in their villages. They also provided assistance in completing it out. Using SPSS version 25, the collected data were coded and subjected to an independent sample t-test analysis. The study’s conclusions showed that, among women entrepreneurs in the study area’s rural areas, programs for women entrepreneurs do not contribute to the reduction of poverty. It is recommended among other things that the government should encourage women’s entrepreneurial development, raise awareness of its existence to people at the grassroot level and make financial assistance more accessible by eliminating many of the complicated procedures associated with loans.