Housing Habitability in Abuja Indigenous Settlements

Abstract

The study examined the housing habitability conditions in Indigenous Peoples Settlements. The research adopted the Urbanized Indigenous Peoples Settlements. These constitutes 14% of the 773 indigenous Settlements that were inexistence at the promulgation of Abuja as the Nigerian New Federal Capital Territory in 1976. In the second stage of data collection,10% of the houses was selected by simple random sampling technique to give a total of 1349 Households. The results of the study revealed that adult constituted lowest proportion (3.4%) of residents in the Indigenous Peoples Settlements. Analysis of Variance(ANOVA) confirmed that, there were significant differences in the age distribution of residents (F=4.11, p= 0.005). The results also inferred, that a trifling 1.0% of the residents in the study area were high income earners, while 99.0% were low and middle income earners. Housing habitability attributes were subjected to factor analysis to evaluate the factors of housing habitability conditions in the study area. Thus, it was discovered that there existed negative correlation between privacy(va), proxemics and security(vb);(-5108,0.0011). The research also opined that abundant, affordable and reliable energy supply(vh) had positive correlation in all Indigenous Settlements (ve,0.6120,0.0001). Furthermore, the study identified social, location, structural and neighborhood attributes as factors that influenced housing habitability in the Indigenous people residents Settlements. In general, the Study concluded that lack of houses with building codes compliance, absence of building with certified designs and absence of fire safety measures was the highest factor (mean=3.32, standard deviation = 0.334) that influence housing habitability conditions. While the next ranked factor of housing habitability (mean=3.12, standard deviation=0.232) was the lack of access road to most Indigenous Settlements.