The sustainable use of clean and safe sources of energy is indeed a global challenge. Traditional and unsafe forms of energy use is predominant among households in sub-Saharan Africa. This is not only a threat to the environment, but also constitutes health risk to the population. In the Nigeria context, this study provides the first attempt to estimate household energy poverty status and also investigate the driving factors of household energy poverty status using the National Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) dataset. The analytical techniques adopted in this study are based on Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (MEPI) and Tobit regression model. Our results show that national average MEPI was 0.38, suggesting that majority of the households are energy poor. Energy poverty is however found to be higher in rural areas than in urban areas. We also found that male-headed households, age, rural sector and northeast residents are found to be the energy poverty enhancing factors, while household income and credit access are energy poverty inhibiting factors. The study concludes that income smoothening among other energy poverty reduction interventions should be prioritized, especially among rural households in order to help them exit energy poverty trap.

In an attempt to go beyond the conventional mean impact assessment of agricultural interventions, this paper examines the distributional impacts of adoption of drought-tolerant maize varieties (DTMVs) on the productivity and welfare outcomes of rural farming households in Nigeria. The study employed a conditional instrumental variable quantile treatment effects approach to control for selection bias that may arise from both observed and unobserved factors. The empirical findings revealed that adoption significantly impacts the distributions of maize yield and farming households’ welfare. In particular, the effects of adoption are larger at the lower tails of the distributions of yield and welfare outcomes, suggesting that the strategic roles of DTMVs adoption in raising productivity and reducing poverty are better among poor farming households. These findings emphasize that effective targeting and dissemination of improved agricultural technologies are critical for increasing maize yield and improving welfare outcomes of rural farmers in Nigeria. Policy measures targeted at tackling dissemination constraints, such as the promotion of informal seed sector, may help enhance the successful dissemination and adoption of DTMVs or any agricultural intervention without masking out any sub-groups.

Agriculture is central in order to achieve nutrition goals through the provision of food, energy and essential micronutrients for the physical and mental development of humans. Dietary diversity is a good indicator of human food security status. Using a dataset obtained from the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study—Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA), this paper examines the linkages between crop diversity and food security (measured as dietary diversity) among farming households in Nigeria using ordinary least squares, Poisson regression, and instrumental variables (IV) Poisson regression to estimate the relationship. In addition, we investigate the determinants that lead to the consumption of each food groups considered for generating dietary diversity using a logit regression model. The results show that food expenditure, asset ownership and location of households are the key factors driving the types of food consumed by the households. Furthermore, increased food expenditure and access to credit were found to positively influence food security. The result established a positive and significant relationship between crop diversity and dietary diversity. Our findings call for more attention to diet diversity, as well as the need to harmonize the roles of rural income improvement, especially through non-farm livelihood diversification in tackling multiple nutritional deficiencies in Nigeria.