DOI: 10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx0tc
title: Deforestation: An implication of high rates of unemployed and low-Income household members in rural communities in Kebbi, Nigeria

description: Deforestation has been a major environmental issue in Northern Nigeria and
 despite several advocacy, yet such practice has continued to endure. A
 root course factors are unemployment and low-income among households in
 Northern Nigeria. As a result of low social/financial status of the
 household, they depend highly on cutting down trees to make fuel wood
 (firewood) and charcoal (gotten from burnt wood) for the source of energy
 for their domestic and commercial activities. This was proven by the
 analysis of a secondary dataset using R-Programming, sourced from the
 World Bank Microdata Library, a survey carried out in 2015 in Kebbi,
 Nigeria titled Nigeria-Feed the Future Livelihood Project 2015, Baseline
 Survey worldbank.org. The dataset contains 3976 households
 observed and 296 values were found missing which resulted to analyzing
 3758 household after the missing values were omitted. Variables describing
 the employed members of the household, energy sources for lighting fuel
 and energy sources for cooking fuel for the households were extracted from
 the secondary dataset. Results revealed that there are over 3000
 households dependent on fuel wood as an energy source. Also, results
 (ANOVA) revealed that annual income of the households has significant
 impact on cooking fuel sources (0.0104&lt;0.05) and has a very strong
 significance on lighting fuel sources (0.000&lt;0.05). The low-income
 rate of households was evident showing the relationship between employed
 members of the households with a very strong significance on annual income
 of the households (0.000375&lt;0.05). This revealed that unemployed
 members of the households results to low-income of the households in Kebbi
 make them to highly depend on the use of fuel wood (firewood) and charcoal
 (gotten from burnt wood) on a dialy bases as a source of energy for
 cooking and lighting fuel. They also export and sell fuel wood and
 charcoal for financial gain to neighboring countries.
description: <strong>Method of Data Collection</strong>
 Survey method of data collection was conducted by the World Bank
 in the collection of data from 3976 household in the rural communities in
 Kebbi, Nigeria. 4 variables were extracted from the original dataset to
 form a new dataset (<strong>Kebbi.csv</strong>).Below are the
 description of the extracted variables.
 <strong>Method of Data Analysis</strong>
 Different analytical models were applied to analyze the variables
 using R Programming. The frequencies and the mean of each variable were
 determined respectively by histogram and boxplot. The null
 hypothesis (H<sub>0</sub>)(H<sub>0</sub>) was
 tested using One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and will be rejected
 if (p&lt;0.05)(p&lt;0.05).
description: In the process of analyzing the
 dataset <strong>Kebbi.csv</strong> having 3976 observations,
 269 values were discovered missing and was omitted. A new data
 frame Kebbitable.1 with 3758 observations was created.
 <strong>Variables</strong>
 -<strong>Employed_members:</strong> These are a
 numeric data describing how many members of the household in Kebbi worked
 in a business or in a self-employment in the past 12 month which is ranked
 (No = 0, Yes = 1) to determine the number of members of each household is
 employed.
 -<strong>Annual_income:</strong> These are numeric
 data on annual income of households ranked from 1 Naira (N1) to 20 Naira
 (N20) which is used to grade income level. Naira is the currency name for
 Nigeria with symbol (N). To determine the deforestation
 rate which one of its courses is the use of fuel wood and charcoal for
 source of energy for domestic (cooking, lighting, ironing), commercial
 (ironing, bakery, street fast food) and economic gain (selling of fuel
 wood and charcoal) purposes by households, the following variables were
 also analyzed.
 -<strong>Lighting_fuel_source:</strong> Ranked from 1
 to 10 in the category of collected firwood, purchased firewood, grass,
 kerosene, phcn electricity, generator, gas, battery, candles, and
 others.
 -<strong>Cooking_fuel_source:</strong> Ranked from 1
 to 9 in the category of collected firewood, purchased firewood, coal,
 grass, kerosene, phcn electricity, generator, gas, and others.