Contributions Of Information And Communication Technologies To Enterprises Of Rural Dwellers

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies are offering new ways for communicating and exchanging information and knowledge. The study pursued the potentials of use of ICTs to enhance rural people's livelihood in terms of access to relevant information for their occupation. The study was carried out in Oyo state, using multistage random sampling technique to select 120 respondents. Data collected was analysed using frequencies and percentages to describe the findings while multinomial logit model and PPMC were used to test for relationship between the variables in the study's hypotheses. The study found that most (63.3%) of the respondents were male, 72.5% were married and with mean of 6.84 years of formal education. They were mostly crop farmers and the crops cultivated by most of them were cassava, maize, cowpea, cashew and vegetable, and they have mean of 16.58 years of experience. They mostly required price and sales information for their enterprises. The major sources of information to the respondents were fellow professionals and family and friends while the main ICT sources were radio, GSM and television. The GSM features appreciably used by the respondents were voice call, SMS and voice SMS. The study found that 55.0% of the respondents were in the low level category of ICT users, 51.7% of them had benefited appreciably from the use of the facilities. The mostly realised constraints to use of the ICTs were unreliable power supply, missed information, technical knowledge and network fluctuation. Multinomial logit result found that education (?=0.246; p=0.000) and number of dependants (?=-0.412; p=0.006) significantly influenced the respondents' use of ICT tools. PPMC analysis revealed that use of ICTs is significantly increased by the benefits realised (r=0.638; p=0.000) and significantly (r=-0.258; p=0.005) reduced by constraints to ICT use. The study provided empirical evidence that access to ICTs can significantly improve the enterprises of rural dwellers and hence a poverty alleviation strategy in rural areas.