Charcoal Enterprise in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria

Charcoal enterprise has been adopted to meet some socio-economic benefits and energy needs of the people. The study was conducted to determine peoples’ involvement, uses and reasons for using charcoal,distribution channel as well as weekly sales and profit of the enterprise. The results revealed that people involved in sales of charcoal were 28.26%, 9% and 2% of the respondents for Igun Street, Oba  market/New Benin and Ikpoba Hill market respectively. The identified uses of charcoal were for roasting of maize (32. 75%), Suyapreparation and cooking of food accounted for 13.70% and 16.13% respectively, while Black Smiting and Bronze casting accounted for 13.70% of the respondents. ANOVA indicated that there were no significant differences (P >0.05) among the identified reasons for using charcoal as well as the weekly sales of the product. However,distribution channel of charcoal showed significant difference (P< 0.05) with dominant retail channel revealed using fishers least significant difference (LSD). The weekly profits of over N2,000 were confirmed by 48. 48% and 24.24% of the respondents for the rainy and dry seasons respectively. Research effort in charcoal enterprise needs to be focused in order to ensure sustainable development and realization of the desired potential of the enterprise

Evaluation of forest policy in Nigeria: A case study of Edo state

The research was undertaken from 1997-2000 to investigate how forest policy has faired in meeting the set objectives in forestry contexts and development in study area. The result showed that deforestation and consolidation of forest reserves accounted for 73.64 and 3.10%, respectively. The result also revealed that there was significant difference in the participation of professional foresters and taskforce as well as regeneration and exploitation of forest resources (P&lt;0.05). It also revealed that there were significant differences among the threats to forest protection (P&lt;0.05) and further analysis with LSD identified trespass as the most dominant threats. The result also showed that the increase in employment, creation of man made forest and encouragement of private forestry accounted for 41.65, 19.85 and 10.19% respectively. It was observed that there was no significant difference among the various rates of decline of the forest estates under review.Keywords: Policy evaluation, environmental protection, consolidation, exploitation, pervasive issue