Poverty and wetland degradation; a case study of Bisina wetland complex in Kapir sub county, Ngora district.

Abstract

The relationship between. poverty and environmental degradation has been on the global agenda for a long time. This attracted research to be done in Ngora District to establish the nexus since Uganda is a developing country susceptible to the degradation like any other country as shown by the literature review of poverty. The research was carried out in Sub County using the structured questionnaires that were distributed to the respondents to fill in and latter collected by the researcher. Both the qualitative and quantitative methods were employed in the course of gathering the data with some focus group discussions conducted to meet the objectives of the research. The research used purposive sampling to avoid the element of time wasting keep focused on the respondents in the Bisina wetland Vicinity. Quality control checks were carried out to make sure that data met the objectives of the research by carefully entering the data in the excel sheets with the special care on the coding of the data in its raw form. The data analysis was done and the findings summarized into the tables that were easier to interpret 67.2% of the respondents were male, 328% were female, 48.3% were married, 29(50%) agreed that poverty has accelerated the rate of environmental degradation which was the majority, 36(62.1%) agreed that wetland degradation has been brought about by population growth, 29(50%) agreed that due to clearance of wetland vegetation for agriculture leading to the degradation, 41(70.7%) agreed that wetlands have been destroyed by mining activities. 31(53.4%) disagreed meaning that they cannot afford necessities of life e.g. food, shelter education, health. 17(29.3%) disagreed meaning that cannot afford to spend more than 2500 a day hence living below the poverty line depending directly on the environment for survival. The research found out the. poverty influences environment degradation in the sub county though there were other causes of the degradation like population growth, urbanization the recommendations were government needed to enforce laws to protect nature and also investing in the education of the respondents to reduce illiteracy through UPE and USE. The better solution which can rescue both the environment and poor people is through the government by increasing the rate of job creation for poor people. If they have jobs they can afford higher quality life which includes affording electricity, they can also afford nice roofing materials instead of using gasses and they can have somewhere to wake up to instead of harvesting the natural resources every day.