ASSESSMENT OF YOUTH EMPOWERMENT PROGRAMME AS VIABLE POLICY FOR RURAL AGRARIAN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN KATSINA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Youth Empowerment is a systematic process/policy for rural agrarian community development in Nigeria. Katsina State was purposively chosen. Multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 190 respondents each from participating trainee on dyeing, pottery, catering, welding and blacksmithing and non-participating farmers to assess the impact of the programme in community development. Information was obtained by the use of structured questionnaires guided by trained enumerators. Descriptive statistics, foster-greer-thorbecke (FGT) index, propensity score marching (PSM) were used to describe the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, measure their poverty status and the impact as a result of participation in the programme respectively. The results revealed that majority respondents were agile and fell between age bracket of 26 and 27 with higher percentage of male (76 and 75), with a good number marked (64% and 63%), and a higher proportion of educationally advantage (88% and 87%) of both the participant and non-participant. Similarly, the poverty depth index were 0.326 and 0.412, which showed higher poverty among non-participant (0.412) of the programme. The result further indicated the average programme effect on poverty status, test index of youth participating is between 5.9 to 7.2% higher than the non-participant which makes it significant at 1% level of probability and has impacted on poverty status of the participant. Therefore, among the recommendation were advocating for both Government and Non-governmental organization to facilitate community driven development through empowerment programmes for sustainable development.