Abstract

Diversification of livelihood portfolios over the years has grossly been a wellbeing improvement avenue, while poverty has been concluded to exceed mere income deprivation but rather, a multidimensional menace. This study hence sets to investigate the effect of livelihood diversification on multidimensional poverty among poultry farming households in South west Nigeria, using data collected from 210 households via multistage sampling procedure and analysed using parametric, and non-parametric analytical tools. The result shows that many of the poultry farming households (59.04%) are diversified, while a majority (89.52%) of them diversified secondarily into non farming activities compared to the relatively fewer proportion (10.48%) in same category that diversified into farming. In all, the diversified poultry farming households were found to suffer lesser deprivation than their nondiversified counterparts, and particularly significant for access to quality healthcare, Household’s basic School enrolment, and Child’ education enrollment with these trio being significant at 5% probabilistic level, except for sickness (perhaps stress induced), and the standard of living categories. Furthermore, their multidimensional poverty index profile favours the diversified as follows; Average intensity of deprivation (AIOD) = 0.437198 and 0.506173; Headcount ratio (H0) = 0.18548 and 0.20930; Multidimensional poverty index (M0) = 0.08109, and 0.10594 for the diversified and Nondiversified households respectively. Also aggregated multidimensional poverty index shows a positive relationship between livelihood diversification and multidimensional poverty, significant at 10% probabilistic level. Further decomposition within the poor category still reveals a positive effect and significant at 10% probabilistic level. Hence, livelihood diversification is a significant means of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of zero poverty in the study area. Finding based policy options are proffered.