Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine socioeconomic factors influencing the participation of households in the Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) programme and estimate the programme’s impact on the poverty status of rural households in Edo and Ondo States, Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select three hundred and twenty respondents across CBNRM participating and non-participating households. Data were collected according to socioeconomic criteria such as the expenditure on food and non-food items and the CBNRM participation status of the respondents surveyed. The endogenous switching regression model was used as an analytical tool. The following factors were found to exert significant influence on the participation of households in the CBNRM programme: year of schooling (p<0.05), membership in associations (p<0.05), value of disposable assets (p<0.1) and value of household’s food expenditure (p<0.05). A coefficient of correlation of 0.1625, obtained for the CBNRM participants, indicates that the CBNRM participants have higher per capita consumption expenditure than a random household by N1,369.17. The present study unequivocally demonstrated that participation in the CBNRM programme increased the per capita expenditure of the households considered, positively affecting their poverty status and emphasising the importance of education, household food expenditure, disposable assets and membership in association as determining factors for the CBNRM programme participation.