Foreign Direct Investment, Poverty Reduction and Employment Generation in Rivers State, Nigeria, 2015-2025

This study examined the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on poverty reduction and employment generation in Rivers State, Nigeria, between 2015 and 2025. Despite cumulative FDI stock exceeding $60 billion by 2024, concentrated overwhelmingly in petroleum and petrochemical operations, Rivers State continued to exhibit poverty rates of approximately 45 per cent and unemployment exceeding 30 per cent, a disconnect that motivated the study's two objectives. The study was anchored on Dunning's Eclectic Paradigm (OLI Theory) and Dependency Theory, which jointly explain why resource-seeking FDI concentrates in Rivers State's petroleum sector and why such capital-intensive, enclave-structured investment has historically generated limited broad-based local development. A convergent parallel mixed methods design was adopted across Port Harcourt City, Obio/Akpor, Eleme and Bonny Local Government Areas. A structured four-point Likert questionnaire was administered to a Taro Yamane-derived sample of 400 respondents, drawn from a target population of 2,350,000 and analysed using descriptive statistics and simple linear regression, while thirty semi-structured key informant interviews supplied qualitative triangulation. Findings showed that FDI had a statistically significant but substantively weak effect on both poverty reduction (R² = 0.081, p < .001) and employment generation (R² = 0.097, p < .001), with respondents overwhelmingly disagreeing that foreign investment had reduced household poverty or generated substantial direct local employment, instead reporting that environmental degradation had eroded farming and fishing livelihoods and that domestic labour remained confined to casual, low wage positions while technical and managerial roles were staffed by expatriates. The study recommends converting discretionary corporate social responsibility palliatives into legally enforceable host community development trusts and reforming local content enforcement to measure genuine technical skills transfer rather than contract value.