Environmental determinant of rural households’ vulnerability to water scarcity in semi-arid Nigeria / Mohammed Baba-Adamu and Ibrahim Ahmed Jajere

Though water resource is an important natural endowment for the attainment of improved living conditions and sustainable development, man’s consumptive demand for it continued to fall short of the supplies. This is especially in the rural communities of the semi-arid region of Nigeria, whose most water sources are unimproved and the supplies from which fall below the demand, resulting in water scarcity. The study assessed the environmental perspective of the rural households’ susceptibility to water scarcity in Nigeria. The study employed multistage sampling, the mixedmethod approach of data sourcing, and the data were analyzed with the basic descriptive and inferential statistical tools. The study findings show the continued practice of extended family system, characterized with low literacy rate and weak income levels, use of shared latrines, as well as defecation in the bushes and open spaces. It also demonstrated nine-in-ten households are vulnerable to the complex conditions of water scarcity, especially those in Kerri-Kerri Formation and the Fika Shale, as the Pearson correlation of the conditions revealed. The linear regression model of the correlated variables statistically proved to have accounted for more than 60% of the water crisis. However, the households’ adaptation strategies to water scarcity were traditional and highly ineffective to the problem of water scarcity conditions of the area. This denotes that the environmental variability influences both water availability and vulnerability to scarcity. Therefore, the study recommends the mainstreaming of the physical environmental conditions into the rural water policy, in addition to upgrading and maintenance of the available water facilities.