Assessment of Poverty Persistence and Vulnerability of Rural Households in Nigeria

The study assessed persistence and vulnerability to poverty among rural households in Nigeria. The Nigeria - Living Standards Survey (NLSS) of year 2018 – 2019 dataset was used. Employing 3-stage Feasible Generalized Linear Regression (FGLS) to estimate vulnerability to poverty; the average age of the respondents stood at 48 years with average household size of 6 and dependant of 4 on average. The result further showed that higher proportion of the rural households were vulnerable to poverty. Less than half (44%) of the households were highly vulnerable to poverty and 34.5% were moderately vulnerable to poverty. The expected poverty was higher (71.4%) than the observed poverty (67.1%), indicating that higher poverty is imminent in future. Furthermore, the study shows that the coefficient of primary education (p = 0.075), access to credit (p = 0.000), electricity (p = 0.033), farm asset (p = 0.000), and remittance (p = 0.043) indicated a negative sign and significantly influence vulnerability to poverty. In conclusion, poverty will persist and increase with rise in age, dependency ratio, covariate and idiosyncratic shocks, lack of formal education, distance to health facility and type of toilet used by the respondents. The study therefore recommends prompt implementation of measures that will reduces shocks specific to regions in the country.