INTEGRATED STRATEGY FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA: THE PAINS AND GAINS

Abstract

This paper intends to critically assess the impacts of rural development strategies on grassroots development in Nigeria. Suffice it to say that successive governments in Nigeria have introduced several strategies aimed at ameliorating the adverse effect of poverty, depression, destitution, deprivation and degradation in rural areas but the results obtained is a far cry from attaining the millennium development goal(1) of eradicating extreme poverty in 2015. The major cause of high exodus of rural dwellers to urban centre in search of greener pastures is the neglect of rural infrastructures. The rural areas are generally characterized by high level of illiteracy, abject poverty, unemployment, and lack of basic infrastructures such as good road, pipe borne water, electricity, communication facilities, health care delivery, and good schools. The continuous rural-urban drift no doubt poses serious threat to the economy of Nigeria as rural predicament has turned to urban calamity due to high cost of living, overcrowding, mass unemployment, social disorder and wide spread poverty in city centre. However, some of the gains of rural development strategies include; improvement in agricultural production and the formation of co-operative societies. Being that as it may, there appears to be no definitive answer to a most plausible and effective way of improving the lives and conditions of rural dwellers. This is not unconnected with the fact that most previous strategies aimed at enhancing rural transformation were either sartorial or agrarian in nature. The integrated approach on the other hand was a multi-sartorial change strategy which was introduced in late 1974. Two programmes were designed to achieve the objectives of the integrated rural development strategy. They include; the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) and Accelerated Development Area (ADA). Unfortunately, the inconsistency in government policies and programme led to the neglect of such laudable initiatives. It is against this backdrop that this paper seeks to recommend the integrated strategy for rural development as panacea for rural transformation in Nigeria