Socio-Economic Impact of Non-Timber Forest Products in Income Generation for Sustainable Forest Management in Gambari Forest Reserve, Oyo State, Nigeria

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are vital to world food security mostly because of the dependence of majority of people especially the forest rural poor on forest products for food, shelter and other basic necessities.However, the sustainable production of many NTFPs is no longer assured in many places in which it is used and managed.Therefore, this study assessed the socio-economic impact of non-timber forest products in income generation for sustainable forest management (SFM) in Gambari forest reserve, Oyo state.Twenty households were selected from three communities (Ibusogboro, Gambari and Onipe) out of a total of ten communities in the study area using the simple random sampling procedure.The main targets were the household heads.A total of sixty respondents were selected for the study.Both primary and secondary data was used for this study.Primary data was collected through the use of questionnaire while secondary data was obtained from literatures and internet.The questionnaire was designed to elicit information on the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, income generating opportunities, NTFPs available in the study area and socioeconomic impact of income generating opportunities in enhancing rural livelihood.Data were subjected to descriptive statistics and logit regression.Result showed that majority of respondents is male with 61.7%, age class of 31-40 years (50.0%),married (56.7%), (31.7%)had no formal education, main occupation was farming (45.0%) and 55.0% have 11-15years experience in NTFPs business.most abundant NTFPs were fuel wood (63.3%) and palm wine (43.3%).28.3% of respondents generated income above N600,000/annum equivalent to US$5.05 per day.Logistic regression indicated that high standard of living, high income (HI),basic health care (BHC), and provision of food (PF) was the most significant income generating opportunities with odds-ratio of 4.80,3.30,3.02 and 2.64 respectively.NTFPs in income generation can only be effective for sustainable forest management if forest resources are effectively managed.