Can social assistance programmes stimulate fairness of access to agricultural inputs acquisition and reduce poverty among smallscale farmers in south-western Nigeria ?

This article examines whether access to social-assistance programmes can stimulate fairness to acquisition of agricultural inputs and poverty reduction among small-scaled farmers. The study focused on social-assistance programmes of e-wallet scheme and analyzed the extent. This method was able to improve the life chances of extremely poor beneficiaries. Mixed method approaches were adopted and this included a quantitative survey of about 8, 000 beneficiaries, and a representative sample of 600 data in south-west zone, Nigeria. An experimental-design adopted was used to compare households before and after e-wallet scheme (EWS) with non-beneficiaries households. Hence, 203 non-beneficiaries small-scaled farmers were recruited into the programme through the methodology of the selection of 600 beneficiaries Regression discontinuity design (RDD) was used to examine the causal impact of social-intervention programmes on agricultural outputs and poverty status of respondents. Descriptive statistics indicated that 87.5% of EWS beneficiaries had income increase, mean age of 47 years and diversification index of 11.5. Instrument adopted in the RDD gave the model a good fit (F statistic of 40.91). The RDD model results revealed that 1% increase in per capita income from the EWS beneficiaries was linked with 0.75 increase in a household's livelihood diversification. There existed a causal impact of EWS beneficiaries on income increase and improvement of poverty status.