ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION OF QUALITY OF LIFE IN DOGARAWA, SABON-GARI LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, KADUNA STATE NIGERIA.

R.O.Yusuf and I.O. Orire

Environment is the totality of all bio-physical, socioeconomic, cultural and policy surroundings of man. In rapidly changing rural-urban transitional settlements, wellbeing of the residents is linked to the provisioning and regulatory functions of the environment and where these are deficient; the quality of life is undermined. This paper addresses this theme in Dogarawa, though the headquarters of Sabon-gari local government area of Kaduna state yet a settlement in transition from rural to urban. Data were collected from 180 systematically selected households through a questionnaire survey. Data were analyzed with descriptive statistical techniques and multiple regression analysis to identify the environmental variables that explains quality of life. The key findings include that 172 of the sampled households depended on well some of which were unprotected, all the residents did not have access to modern waste disposal facilities and more than 87% of the sampled households suffer diseases of diverse causes. About 78% of the respondents perceived their quality of life as low compared to neighbourhoods like Sabon-gari central area and Zaria city with indicators such as burden of diseases and infection, insecurity of people and properties and exposure to environmental nuisance. Multiple regression result indicates that of the seven selected variables, four: X1 (incidence of communicable diseases), X7 (vulnerability to domestic armed-robbery attacks), X5 (environmental nuisance) and X3 (socioeconomic status-related diseases) have r² of 0.7458 indicating about 74.5% of the variance in low quality of life. Policy recommendations include advocacy planning on self-help efforts to fill the gaps in infrastructural deficiency by government, public awareness on the unrivalled need to adopt environmental sanitation efforts, and, utilization of some human-induced landscapes such as excavation pits for eco-supportive infrastructure in order to turn negative environmental phenomena to positive spatio-temporal uses. The conclusion is that various degrees of negative anthropogenic-environmental interaction of humans impact the ability of the environment to continuously support high quality of human life.

Key words: Environmental perception, quality of life, transitional rural settlements, Dogarawa, Sabon-gari LGA.