Participation and Altitude of Beneficiaries to the Third National Fadama Development Project in Kogi State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study assessed the attitude to and participation of beneficiaries in the Third National Fadama Development Project in Kogi State, Nigeria. One hundred randomly selected beneficiaries were used. Data were collected with the aid of structured interview schedule and analysed by the use of mean scores and factor analysis. The results reveal that beneficiaries participated at collegial, consultative, and collaborative levels in different activities of the project. Majority (74.0%) of the respondents were satisfied with the objective, activities and operational modalities of the project. The respondents however, indicated that the project was constrained by production, institutional and financial factors. The study recommends that beneficiaries should be encouraged to be self- mobilized in certain areas of the project like design, implementation and supervision of sub-project, selecting services, service providers and location of productive assets. The government, both state and local should ensure timely and adequate provision of fund to facilitate effective implementation of activities in critical areas such as capacity building, demand driven adaptive research, mobility of facilitators and others, which largely influence performance of the project in terms of realizing the objectives.

Key words: Beneficiaries, Attitude, Participation, Fadama, Project, Fadama user groups (FUGs), Fadama community associations (FCAs).