SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The poor quality of rural road infrastructure may limit the transport services available to rural dwellers. The objective of this study is to understand the travel choices made by rural smallholder farmers in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria in the face of poor rural road infrastructure. The study uses an existing sampling frame of smallholder farmers obtained from the World Bank-supported Fadama III Project in Akwa Ibom State, and employs multistage sampling to generate data. According to the data, motorcycles are the most owned means of transportation in the study area, and also the most used – even by persons who do not own any means of transportation. Further, we employ the multinomial logit model to examine the factors that influence their choices of means of transportation, and we use motorcycle as the reference category. The result shows that the preference of respondents for the different means of transportation is influenced mainly by the attributes of the means of transportation. In addition, among the socio-economic variables included in the model, only the coefficient of income under saloon cars is significant. Given that motorcycles and tricycles are now dominating the rural transport landscape as an economical way to meet the transport needs of people, rural transport policy in Nigeria should be revised to reflect this reality. The operation of motorcycles and tricycles should be properly mainstreamed in rural transport policy to improve rural transport services.