Developing Small Towns as a Panacea to Poverty Reduction in Nigeria: A Focus on Itam And Ikot Ekpene in Akwaibom State, Nigeria

Nigeria’s economic development has most times been centred on promoting the expansion and growth of major cities in the country, while relegating the small towns to the background. Much attention has not been placed on rehabilitating and providing better living conditions for inhabitants of small towns.  This has resulted in the continuous influx of goods and services into bigger cities, with the aim of finding greener pastures. This incidence invariably brings about overpopulation problems as encountered in these cities. Most of the poverty incidence experienced in Nigeria is often times situated in small towns where there are high level of income inequality and illiteracy. It is against this background the paper adopts a textual analysis to ascertain the rate of poverty incurred in small towns as a result of rural-urban migration. The paper also establishes the facts that developmental incentives in small towns is a panacea for equal development across the unit of the country. From the evidence in the paper, it is recommended that one way to reduce the poverty rate anchors on the need for government to ensure that measures for allocation of public investment across different sized urban agglomerations should be implemented selectively based on landmass so as to avoid over-crowding.