AN ANALYSIS OF WOMEN'S CONTRIBUTION TO HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY IN DOKO DISTRICT OF LAVUN LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF NIGER STATE

While much work has been done on women’s roles in Agricultural activities, little has been done on their level of contribution to household food security, particularly in Doko district of Lavun local government area of Niger State. The major objective of this paper is to determine the level of women contribution to house hold food security, ascertain the percentage of their income spent on consumption and to determine the degree of influences of constraints faced by women in contributing to household food security. Following a survey conducted using 239 randomly selected respondents. The study revealed that about 74% of the respondents have small household size and. about 60.7% of the respondents spends up to 60% of their total income on purchasing food items for their household and about 64%of the respondents use their personal farm produce mainly for household consumption. Up to 89.1% of the respondents indicated that they are in dear need of more food and about 77.8% of the responding strongly agreed that increased/decrease in income usually affect food availability and quality of their household diet. The chi-square analysis revealed that there is no significant relationship between the constraints faced by the women and there level of contribution to household food security (x² 1.155; p>0.05). It was recommended that there should be a deliberate effort in enhancing women activities in the study areas so that they can contribute meaningfully to household food security and national food security.