Tackling Crippling Poverty, Panacea to The Nigerian Economic Decay

Abstract

The issue of poverty is a multidimensional conception and often defined by zeroing mainly on income poverty or broadly by including lack of access to opportunities for raising standards of living. However, tackling crippling poverty in a Nation at crossroads like Nigeria requires the need to identify factors that are strongly associated with poverty and agreeable to modification by policy formulation and implementation. The focus of the research work was basically to examine the poverty level and its determinants in Ado-Ekiti. Primary data were collected from the random sample of 101 salary earners using self-structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents. The poverty level was measured using Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) poverty indices, while probit regression model was employed to examine factors that influence poverty among the salary earners. The result from the descriptive statistics showed that the female salary earners within the age bracket of 34-41 years with polygamous marital status were pro poor. The incidence of poverty show that 46.5% of the sampled salary earners were actually poor based on the poverty line. The poverty depth indicated that an average poor salary earner would require 13.9% of the poverty line to get out of poverty, while the poverty severity was 6.23%. Estimation by gender group revealed that poverty was most pervasive among female salary earners with a value of 3.7% compared to other category. The probit regression further indicated that the likelihood of being poor were more with household size, level of education, place of occupation and income level. The study, therefore, recommended amongst other things that government should embark on a poverty alleviation program, especially for women so that the unemployed among women folk can be financially empowered Keywords: Poverty, Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (FGT) indices, Salary Earners, Probit Journal Reference Format: Oyewole, K.S. & Awoyemi, O.B. (2023): Tackling Crippling Poverty, Panacea to The Nigerian Economic Decay. Humanities, Management, Arts, Education & the Social Sciences Journal. Vol. 11. No. 2, Pp 67-84 www.isteams.net/humanitiesjournal. dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/HUMANITIES/V11N2P7