Ethnography study of informal economic activites of rural women in South-West Nigeria

Topic : Ethnography survey of informal economic activities of rural women in South- west Nigeria

BY

Yusuff, S. Olabisi

Lagos State University

Department of Sociology

OJO

Tel; 2347030386279

E-mail address:soyusuf@yahoo.co.uk

  ABSTRACT

 The focus of this paper is to carry out ethnography survey of rural women informal economic activities with a view of getting first hand information pattern and types of informal economic activities of rural women in Nigeria. The generation of the data is important for sustainability of women economic activities and towards rural development in Nigeria. In recent years, the informal economy has played an increasingly vital role in job creation, service provision, and productive organization in industrialized as well as developing economies. In developing in particularly, studies have revealed the increasing percentage of women in informal economy. Among the larger percentage of women in informal economy are the rural women. Yet, development studies, and social sciences have neglected women informal economic activities in rural areas. Most studies concentrated on rural women’s role(s) only in agriculture. The research question that underlie this paper is what are the informal economic activities rural women in west –south Nigeria engage in. what are their types, patterns, access to resources, motivations and challenges. To achieve the state objective, the research instruments for collection of the data will include, participant observation, Key-Informant Interview, Focus-Group Discussion, and In-depth interview. Information collected will be tape- recorded, transcribed, sorted, and processed with computer qualitative data analysis (Nvivos8). The other method of analyzing data will be through ethnographic summaries and content analysis for pattern explorations. The research report will therefore provide a comprehensive report from responses from all the methods of data collection. It is expected that the findings will give us and improve our knowledge on the Informal economic activities of rural women in Nigeria.