Nigeria is currently experiencing the scourge of rising poverty and the growing threat of food insecurity among
its citizens. This situation has been seen to be especially worse in the rural areas where people’s livelihoods
depend largely on small-scale agricultural output. This is largely due to the prevailing situation of low
availability of productive inputs like credit, inadequate/inappropriate technology, among other issues which
aggravate the poverty and food insecurity situation in these rural areas that hold over half of the Nigerian
population. Past government schemes aimed at improving agricultural output and alleviating poverty have not
yielded the desired results. This study therefore examined the effect of one of such schemes, the National
Special Programme for Food Security (NSPFS), on the poverty status of farming households in Ido Local
Government Area of Oyo State. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze and compare the socioeconomic
characteristics of beneficiary and non-beneficiary households of the NSPFS while the method of fuzzy sets was
used to compare their poverty statuses. Tobit regression analysis was used to examine the determinants of
poverty, pooling together data for both beneficiary and non-beneficiary households. Altogether data from 104
households collected through a multi-stage random sampling procedure was used for analysis. The figure
included 52 beneficiary households and 52 non-beneficiary households. Data was collected on socio-economic
variables including age, household size, educational attainment, ownership of assets among others. The nonbeneficiary
households showed a greater multidimensional poverty depth than their beneficiary counterparts
with an Average Multidimensional Poverty Index (AMPI) of 0.3499 compared to 0.2990 for the beneficiaries.
Poverty Incidence (PI) was also marginally higher among the non-beneficiaries with 44.2% being poor
compared to 38.5% of the beneficiaries. Participating in the NSPFS, age of household head, and educational
attainment all showed inverse relationships with poverty. Household size, farming experience and number of
days of incapacitation (as a proxy for health status) all showed positive causal relationships with the dependent
variable. It was concluded that the NSPFS did have a positive effect on households’ welfare as beneficiaries
showed a smaller poverty incidence and the Tobit regression analysis result showed that participating in the
NSPFS reduced the chances of being poor by 6 percent. This paper thus provides additional empirical evidence
to policy makers in Nigeria with regards to the depth and dimensions of poverty being experienced by rural
households as well as the effectiveness of policy efforts such as the NSPFS. Therefore, similar programmes to
be implemented in the future can be better directed in tackling the complex dimensions of poverty among rural
households in Nigeria.