Abstract
The study investigates how unemployed youths in Cross River state respond to and cope with poor economic conditions. The phenomenon of poverty has been identified as one of the increasing social challenges in Nigeria and has been linked to a number of social problems including street crime, substance abuse, internet fraud, armed robbery, ritual killings, kidnapping, and youth restiveness. Scholars have also argued that whereas the youth is the locomotive of national development and contribute immensely to the sustenance of the developmental momentum of a nation; youths in Nigeria are largely unemployed and redundant. The social consequences of this are enormous and can only be explained from the lens of the restricted opportunity theory and the strain theory. The study employed a cross-sectional survey research design involving questionnaires, interviews, descriptive statistics and 1,010 purposively selected respondents from six local government areas in the three senatorial districts of Cross River. The findings of the study revealed that youth poverty is a growing concern in Cross River state, and is caused by limited access to loans, lack of job opportunities, policy paralysis, among many other factors. Respondents of the study further noted that unemployed youths in the state cope with the hardship associated with poverty and unemployment by engaging in various activities including negative ones such as commercial sex work, theft, cyber fraud, and armed robbery. It is thus recommended, among other things, that the Nigerian State must invest in youth development by creating programmes and funding for small scale businesses, vocational training, and skills development.
Highlights
The phenomenon of increasing poverty levels has remained a major concern in most developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria where the problem of poverty affects a large part of its population and contributes to the CONTACT Emmanuel NwakanmaHarcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria.NWAKANMA & IGBE, Current Research Journal of Social Sciences, Vol 03(2) 262-279 (2020) 263 proliferation of social problems such as street crime, substance abuse, internet fraud, armed robbery, ritual killings, kidnapping, as well as many other social and public health concerns
Cross River State is considered appropriate for this study because of the dearth of reliable data on the phenomenon of poverty and the coping strategies of unemployed youths in Nigeria; this work is posed to fill that gap with a view to creating awareness, influence policy, and expanding literature on the subject matter
The information on the age category shows that 23.5% of the respondents were aged 18-23; the majority of the respondents sampled were between 24-29 years and constituting 42.6%
Summary
The phenomenon of increasing poverty levels has remained a major concern in most developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in Nigeria where the problem of poverty affects a large part of its population and contributes to the CONTACT Emmanuel NwakanmaHarcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria.NWAKANMA & IGBE, Current Research Journal of Social Sciences, Vol 03(2) 262-279 (2020) 263 proliferation of social problems such as street crime, substance abuse, internet fraud, armed robbery, ritual killings, kidnapping, as well as many other social and public health concerns. As noted by a recent World Bank Poverty and Shared Prosperity report of 2017, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where the total number of extremely poor people consistently rises rather than decreases and affecting over 41% of her total population.[1,2] While the rate of extremely poor persons, (defined as persons earning less than $1.90 or €1.64 a day) has dramatically declined globally and falling from 1.9 billion in 1990 to approximately 736 million persons today, an estimated 413 million people currently live in severe poverty in Africa.This number, as noted by Müller-Jung,[1] is more than half of the world's total poverty rate Scholars such as Kazeem,[3] Akanle and Adésìnà,[4] Anyanwu[5] and Anyanwu and Shepherd, Mitchell, Lewis, Lenhardt, Jones, Scott, and Muir-Wood,[6] have all noted that the situation of poverty remains a major bane to Africa’s sustainable development and affects its reputation in the comity of nations. More mysterious and unexplainable is the fact that poverty in Nigeria is chronic, unrelenting, and rising regardless of the various methods employed by succeeding governments to tackle it
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