ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES AND MULTIPLE HEALTH DISADVANTAGE IN DEPRIVED URBAN NEIGHBOURHOODS OF ILORIN, NIGERIA

Abstract

The most striking difference between houses and neighbourhoods in deprived and non-deprived areas of African city is the availability of-and access to- environmental services. This paper examines the level of access to selected environmental services in deprived neighbourhoods of Ilorin and identifies the association between access to these services and the health status of urban residents. The study focuses on the twelve wards identified as deprived in a previous study. 480 households were sampled from the twelve wards which coincide with the indigenous and Frontier Native Area wards of Ilorin metropolis. A structured questionnaire was administered to the households in a multi-stage sampling technique to assess residential quality; and access to deprivable environmental services was examined using nine indicators which were aggregated to obtain an index of multiple deprivations. Deprived households were calculated as a proportion of the total household sampled and analyzed as continuous variables ranging from 0-100%. Health indicators were selected to capture health status perception, child health and health seeking behavior during illness and aggregated to obtain an index of multiple health disadvantages. The associations of deprivation in environmental services on multiple health disadvantages were examined using a multiple regression analysis of nine variables to identify the proximate determinants of multiple health disadvantages in the study area. The contribution of the independent variables on the explanation of the variation in multiple health disadvantagewas high (R2 =0.95) and statistically significant. Four variables were found to possess positive and significant contributions. The study concludes on the overall impact of environmental services on household health and the use of Index of Multiple Disadvantages in Health enables us to derive a quantitative measure of household health from indicators of household health conditions. This can be useful for targeting urban neighbourhoods according to their environmental peculiarities.