Africa indigenous processing as a poverty alleviation strategy among rural women: A case of locust beans processing in South-Western Nigeria

Locust bean is one of the several Non-Timber products which are widely traded in Nigeria irrespective of geographical zones. Poverty make a lot of people depend on natural forest for survival. This locust bean processing is mostly done by women in order to generate more income to meet some of those basic needs that cannot be met by the people due to their low level of income. The study was designed to assess the economic potentials of locust bean processing as a means of alleviating poverty among the processors. Purposive sampling procedure was used to select 160 respondents for the study. Chi-Square was used to test relationship between productivity and other variables. The result showed that 55.0% were between the ages of 30 and 50 years old. All the respondents have one other income generating activity or the other. About 58.0% of the respondents make between N400. 00 ($2.66) and N450.00 ($3.00) profit from processing 5kg of locust beans. Constraints encountered by the processors are scarcity of locust beans, transportation, scarcity of labour and weather variation. Result of Chi-Square analysis showed that educational qualification has a significant relationship (X2 = 8.403, p > 0.05) with periodicity