Abstract

The European Union in collaboration with some non-governmental organisation initiated the European Micro Projects Programme (MPP) in south-south States of Nigeria. Basically, the aim of the progamme was to help improve the poor living condition of communities situated in these areas, by the provision of basic infrastructures. One of the key derivatives from the ecological zones/vegetation belts in Niger Delta is the natural resources aside oil and gas reserves, which serve as a means of livelihood for rural community. The objective of this study was to examine the relative effects of density and accessibility of MPP projects on poverty incidence across the vegetational belts of the south-south states in Nigeria. A cross sectional survey of household units was adopted during data collection and resulting data along with other measured parameters were subjected to a combination of descriptive statistics and spatial analytical techniques, to determine if there are relationships between poverty incidence and MPP project distribution along the vegetation belts. The resulting project density within the belts showed that rain forest and fresh water swamp have more concentration within defined output cells. The poverty ranking results for the ecological regions showed that extremely poor respondents are predominant in all the ecological zones with 100% occurrence in mangrove. Moderately poor respondents are more in the low land rain forest and mangrove and coastal vegetation. The highest number of non-poor falls within the derived rainforest and Mangrove forest and coastal vegetation. There is a negative correlation between density of all projects and extreme poverty condition within the belts. It is established that MPP density was not a good predictor of prevalence of poverty. The significant value p > 0.05 showed it is of no statistical significance. Therefore, distributions of considered spatial variables of the MPP schemes and resulting effects have not sufficiently addressed relative poverty conditions amongst rural communities within the area of interest. Infrastructural facilities need be provided in such a manner to address poverty conditions by supporting the rural communities to tap productive ecological resources in these areas.

Key words: Infrastructure, spatial distribution, poverty conditions, ecological resources, GIS.