Levels of welfare provisions in the rural Areas of the Jos plateau Nigeria

Defining and measuring levels of rural development has remained unsatisfactory. Hence a new approach of measuring rural development has been put forward in this study using certain surrogates and proxy-surrogates. to arrive at rural development indices (RUDEVIs). Thus. through the use of RUDEVIs a rural development typology of the Jos Plateau has been produced. A combination of pre-coded questionnaires and field observations were used for data collection. Field surveys of varying intensities were conducted in 1989, 1990 and i991, whiie the main field survey was conducted from May to July, 1991. In all. 86 rural settlements were studied, based on~ sampling ·covering more than 70 percent of the Jos Plateau, of at least one settlement in a 20 km by 20 km grid cell. At least one community was studied from all the districts on the Jos Plateau. The data collected from the field were coded using an SFSS(x) file.They were later -transferred into QUATRO-PRO spreadsheet to produce tables showing the distribution of social faciJ.ities in the study area. Based on this, the l~vels,of welfare provision were also determined. These information were further fed into the MAPICS computer software to produce t~e rural development typology and maps showing the lev.efs of welfare provision in the study area. The map of the Jos Plat~au was digitised using ISIS. The study has reve,3.led that only about 10 per cent of the studied settlements enjoy a very high degree of rural development, shown by RUDEVI of 70 and above. The 86 rural settiements were classified into seven categories and their RUDEVIs were subjected to analysis of variance. An F-ratio of 3.47 was obtained. This led to the rejection of the null hypothesis at both 5% and 1% significance levels. This implies that the leveis of ~eifare provisions as well as the levels of rural development vary significantly over the Jos Plateau.