Poverty and Welfare Status of Households in Eastern Senatorial District of Kogi State, Nigeria

The study advances to find out the welfare status and poverty situation of households in Eastern Senatorial District of Kogi State. Data for the study were collected using structured questionnaire / interview schedule of households. Three research questions and three hypotheses were stated for the study. The analysis of data was done by the use of To bit regression model and Froster, Greer,Thorbeck (FGT) poverty analysis. The study discovered that the age of household heads, number of people with higher education, gender dummy, and number of hour’s household work per week have positive impacts on household income and are significant at 5% levels of significance. This means that as these variables increase, the households income also increases, leading to a fall in poverty level. Also, it was discovered that location dummy and number of people not educated have negative impact on household income and statistically significant at 5% levels of significance. This means that these variables increases, household income will fall, leading to an increase in poverty among the households. On poverty situation in Kogi State, it was discovered that poverty level varies with different income sources with farm income having the highest level of poverty in the area. The study also revealed that ignoring farm income as the highest level of income among households in the senatorial District has greater effect on poverty severity and poverty gap than poverty headcount. Average poverty for instance increases by 23.3% of those above poverty line. This means that those in poverty are further pushed into poverty when farm income is ignored in poverty calculations. It was also discovered from the analysis that welfare gap for the entire local government areas LGAS was 31.8% when compared to 23.2% for the Senatorial District sample. This indicates an increase of 8.6%.From this analysis, three hypotheses stated were tested and rejected. Based on this, it was recommended that higher Education, number of hours household work per week and gender dummy be encouraged since they have positive impact on household income. It equally means that increasing levels of these variables will greatly improves the well-being of households and bring them out of poverty. It was also recommended that serious poverty intervention projects such as soft loans and farm inputs to real farmer in the area should be intensified so as to increase the welfare status and reduce poverty among individual household in the Senatorial Area of Kogi State.