Socio Economic Features and Poverty Status of Livelihood Diversifiers in Marginal Communities of Ekiti State Nigeria

Abstract

The paper investigates the socio-economic features and poverty status of livelihood diversifiers in marginal communities of Ekiti State, Nigeria. Data were collected from a sample of 80 respondents’ from three communities selected from three Local Government Areas. Descriptive and Hosmer and Lemeshow test were used to analyse the data. It was found that those engaged in livelihood diversification were predominantly male while few of them were female. Over 70 percent of them were still in their active age. Only a handful of them could be outright concluded in illiteracy which reveal how ekiti state people cherish education. In all, 71 percent of them were married which explained the difficulty for such families to relocate to urban centers. Household size was fairly large with 60 percent having between 5-10 household members. This further makes it pretty difficult to relocate to urban centers for greener pastures. Only 21 of them operated fairly large farm holdings of more than 4 ha. The result of the Hosmer and Lemeshow test showed that all the respondents have high degree of susceptibility to change their poverty status. The paper justified that livelihood diversification still remains one of the potent tools of dealing with abject poverty and inability to make ends meet among the rural households in a country where government has nothing or little to offer as safety nets for the vulnerable of the society.