POVERTY AND NUTRITIONAL STATUS OF URBAN AND RURAL HOUSEHOLDS IN ONDO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

In this study, the mean per capita household monthly expenditure (MPCHHME) was obtained to depict the standard of living for each household. For the rural households their MPCHHME was N7941 while for urban households was N11685. The core poverty line was N5294 for rural areas and N7741 for urban areas. This study has revealed that people who are core poor are prevalent in the rural areas of Ondo state with 48.3% while in the urban area they are 30% even when the rural areas' moderate and core poverty lines are lesser than that of urban areas. The factors observed to affect poverty, income and nutritional status were age of family heads, sex, educational qualification of family heads, income, location of households, occupation, household size and amount spent on food expenditure .It was observed from table 8 that more than half of the respondent in both areas were living on less than N20000 per capita monthly. Using N7741 as the moderate poverty line for rural households, Table 17 showed that female headed households had the highest head count of people in poverty with 67% and contributed to poverty incidence with 61%.They also had the highest poverty gap, contribution to poverty gap and contribution to poverty severity of 31%, 57% and 55% respectively. Table 18 revealed that more than two-third of the respondents were nutritionally unsecured based on the FAO recommended daily calorie which is 2250kilocalorie used for this study. In the urban areas, those who were nutritionally insecure were 91.7% while in the rural areas they were 80%. From table 20, 51 out of the total respondents from both urban and rural areas were observed to be none poor yet 35 of them were nutritionally insecure and 16 were observed to be secured. From table 21, it was observed that the mean calorie per day and total calorie consumed by the rural households was higher that of urban households and were significant at 1% while their calorie per capita was not significant.