Effect of Grassroots Women's Vocational Education on Family Socio-Economic Development and National Food Security

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of grassroots women's vocational education on family socio-economic development and national food security in Lagos State, Nigeria. The aim was to evaluate how practical apprenticeship, business workshops, and formal certifications structurally alter household development indicators. Bounded within a cross-sectional scope across four local government areas—Ajeromi-Ifelodun, Mushin, Shomolu, and Badagry—the study adopted a quantitative survey research design sampling 400 micro-entrepreneurs. Utilizing the snowball sampling technique to map informal enterprise networks, data were analyzed via a simultaneous four-equation Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) system model in EViews 13. The theoretical framework of the study was anchored on Human Capital Theory, Household Production Theory, and the Capability Approach. The findings of the study revealed that skills training, management workshops, and vocational certifications exert strong, positive, and highly significant effects on domestic welfare (p=0.0000), yielding a system weighted R-squared of 0.7614. Specifically, holding a certificate increases terminal child school funding by ₦7,542.10 and weekly food spending by ₦3,492.15, while error correlations revealed an inflationary displacement coefficient of -0.28415 between food outlays and daily meal frequency. The study concluded that non-formal vocational education provides marginalized women with the financial agency needed to build domestic economic resilience, eliminate poverty traps, and bypass formal academic entry barriers. Therefore, the study recommended that the government decentralize and subsidize National Trade Test certifications to unlock retail credit, while establishing localized mobile financial literacy training within regional trading hubs to maximize micro-enterprise operational revenues.