An assessment of inclusive growth mechanisms in Nigeria: a case study of Orumba communities

Inclusive growth practice in growth strategies has occupied an integral position in the burgeoning literature of both developed and developing economies, given the need for policy makers to detract from GDP growth and pay attention to the obvious trade-off between spectacular growth of an economy and the well-being of the people, particularly among emerging economies. The central issue underpinning and informing this concern is that attainment of high economic growth with its consequent GDP measure, has failed to capture other well-beings of the people, such as good health and quality education, which has varying implications and impacts in an economy, most often resulting in low rates of employment creation and poverty reduction. This research compliments extant literature in looking at the impact of health and educational services and mechanisms on different components of IG implementation in the Nigerian economy, especially workforce and community settings. This research remarkably differs from the approaches of previous studies which explored composite IG indices and deliveries of health and educational services. The reason is that the aggregation of different categories of IG implementations and components of health and educational services into a composite index may likely blur the exact nature of the impact of each component of health and educational services on each category of IG contained in the index. Therefore, this study decomposed IG implementation into two categories: poverty and unemployment reduction. The study also deconstructed the following into components: health services into private hospitals, secondary hospitals, primary healthcare, alternative healthcare providers; and educational services into primary, secondary, Tertiary and Vocational levels of education. Then critical investigation of the effects and estimation of health and educational services within and outside the delivery systems were carried out to estimate their impacts on IG- poverty and unemployment reduction. Data were sourced through strategic evaluation of health and educational services and IG implementations – poverty and unemployment reduction. Embedded sequential mixed methods research is explored to allow for the fusion of depth and breadth of the research and a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed, which include the use of questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews. The findings of this research reveal that unemployment is high and increasingly rising within the workforce in Nanka which is translating into high rates of poverty within the workforce. It is found that government owned health and educational sectors do not show convincing evidence of strong support to IG, while privately-owned sectors have direct and significant effect on IG but do not show strong impact on IG in the community. The research findings propose an enhanced framework model which suggest the need for government, NGOs and philanthropists to commit resources, institute incentives schemes and regulatory constraints to improve health and educational sectors especially core issues within and outside the sectors that will compel vested interest from the community in those sectors for inclusive growth.