Evaluation of National Directorate of Employment (NDE) in Alleviating Poverty Among Arable Farmers in Ekiti-State, South-West Nigeria

Abstract

This study was designed to assess and evaluate the fundamental efforts of National Directorate of Employment (NDE) in using agricultural programs to combat poverty among small-scale food crop farmers in Ekiti-State, where agriculture is largely practiced as a means of livelihood. Relying on data of 200 arable crop farmers, who benefited from NDE programs and other organized agricultural program and 100 farmers who did not benefit, the study tries to discover if socio-economic characteristics, such as age, educational status, and household size have correlation with severity of poverty. Also, the study tries to investigate if a significant difference exists between the income generated by the beneficiaries of agricultural programs and non-beneficiaries? It equally tries to examine whether a significant difference exist between the poverty status of the beneficiaries of the agricultural programs and non-beneficiaries? Data were collected by the use of multi-stage sampling techniques. Moreover, statistical test of hypotheses and construction of relative poverty lines were used for the evaluation and analysis of the relevant data obtained from the field. Our result shows that socio-economic characteristics have correlation with severity of poverty. It was equally found that those who did not benefit from NDE program (non-benefiting farmers) had the highest vulnerability to poverty as their poverty index was estimated to be 0.94, compared with 0.11 of the beneficiaries.