Assessment of women participation in home gardening in Abuja, Federal Capital Teritory (FCT), Nigeria.

Abstract

The study examined women participation in home garden farming in Abuja FCT, to achieve the study objective, multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 114 respondents from three Area Councils in FCT. Validated interview schedule with reliability coefficient of 0.71 was used for data collection and data collected were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The result revealed that about 40.0% of the respondents were within age range of 41-50 years, while 46.4% of the respondents attended tertiary education. Findings indicated that higher proportions of the respondents cultivated pumpkin (98.2%), bitter leaf (98.2%), green vegetables (94.7%) and maize (91.2%). Women farmers were found to have highly participated in almost all home garden activities. The result also showed that home garden farming provides fresh vegetables/spices (81.5%), food/fruits (80.7%) as well as nutritional (77.1%) and medicinal (71.9%) benefits for the household of the respondents, which enhance their food security. The result further indicated that age, educational level, access to adequate space and housewifery had significant and positive influence on women participation in home garden farming. Some of the severe constraints faced were lack of extension services and pest infestation. Thus, it was recommended that urban city planners should make provision for adequate space for home garden farming while designing original master plan of cities or urban centres to encourage home garden farming. It was also suggested that the scope of extension services in FCT should be expanded to adequately cover cities and urban centre’s home garden farming families