Effects of Livelihood Assets on Poverty Status of Farming Households’ in Southwestern, Nigeria

Poverty as a multi-dimensional phenomenon is determined by a wide range of factors one of which is the non-equity in distribution and scarcity of assets in development opportunities. The eradication of poverty in rural Nigeria remains a hard challenge for the country to overcome despite the various poverty eradication programmes implementation at different levels of government. This study examined the effects of farmers’ household livelihood assets on poverty. Primary data were collected using well structured questionnaire from 135 farming households in Egbeda Local Government Area of Oyo State, Nigeria and analyzed using descriptive statistics, Foster Greer Theobecke (FGT) weighted poverty index and Logit regression model. The result shows that poverty line (PL) which is the two-third of the respondents’ mean per capita expenditure (PCE) is N1770.40 ($11) with 31.9 percent of the respondents falling below the PL while average PCE equals N2636.12 (about $18). The poverty incidence index was 0.296, poverty depth index is 0.054 and the poverty severity index is 0.015. Socio-economic characteristic like Gender (p<0.1), Human assets such as education (p<0.01), farming experience and health status (p<0.1); Physical assets like land and agricultural machinery ownership (p<0.05); Financial asset like cooperative funding (p<0.05) and Aggregate Social capital (p<0.1) will reduce the poverty status of farming households in Southwestern, Nigeria. Based on the findings of this study, the study recommends that access and use of human capital, financial, physical and social capital assets are important to reduce the poverty status of farming households in Southwestern, Nigeria.