ABSTRACT
HIV/AIDS related problems have continued to be major
problems for human welfare.
The study was set to evaluate the impact of HIV/AIDS on
livelihood of rural farmers of Enugu State which has HIV prevalence of 5.2 with
about 51,639 persons infected. The study specifically sought to: describe socio
economic characteristic of people living with HIV/AIDS, describe the major
HIV/AIDS related problems in the rural areas, describe people living with
HIV/AIDS’ access/responses to sources of helps to cope with their health
status, determine people living with HIV/AIDS’ access to farm assets such farm
size, labour, and estimate determinants of technical efficiency of HIV/AIDS
infected households. A total of 54 HIV/AIDS affected households were selected.
Data were collected through the use of structured questionnaires. Data analysis
involved the use of descriptive statistics, Principal Component Analysis,
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Lest Significant Difference (LSD) as well as
Coelli 4.0 maximum likelihood estimation techniques. Results showed that fifty
six percent of the respondents were females while forty four were males. The
distribution by age shows that majority of the patients were between 16-38
years. Access to free drugs and medication was very limited in the study area.
Results show that only 16 percent of
respondents always had access to free medication while the
majority (63%) did not. Free
medication is necessary in view of the high cost of drugs
and numerous diseases associated
with HIV. Twenty-seven percent of the respondents often
received help from NGOs while 55
percent did not often receive such help. Principal component
analysis showed that HIV
infected households were responding most to family helps and
also to nutrition and free
medication as well as financial help. The LSD test showed
that HIV reduces the mean scores
of the selected farm assets namely farm size, family labour,
hired labour and income. The
Maximum Likelihood Estimates (MLE) estimate showed that
variance-ratio parameter γ*
was 0.5659. It implied that 56.59 percent of the differences
between observed and the
maximum frontier output for the farmers was due to the
existing differences in efficiency
levels among them. The estimated value of gamma was 0.782
for all the farmers. Its t-value
was 2.636. The statistical significance of this value at 5
percent level implied that all the
farmers were grossly inefficient in agricultural production.
It showed that productivity is
positively related to Land Area (farm size), Family labour,
Hired labour and quantity of
fertilizer. It was recommended among others that Champaign
against HIV should be directed
more to young people who are the most infected in order to
increase the number of youths
actively involved in farming.