Influence of Professional Social Workers’ Participation in Vocational Training Programmes on Economic Well-Being of Rural Dwellers in Lagos State, Nigeria

The development of any nation hinges on the social and economic contribution of its citizens. Unfortunately, Nigeria does not seem to give vocational education attention it deserves. The role of social workers is widely accepted globally, especially, in the Western part of the world but has been grossly neglected in Nigeria. This paper, therefore, examined the influence of professional social workers’ participation in vocational training programmes on economic well-being of rural dwellers in Lagos State, Nigeria. The descriptive survey of correlation was used for the study while the multi-sampling techniques were used to select 300 respondents for the study. Multiple regressions were used to analyse the data collected. The study established that there were joint contributions of all the independent variables to the prediction of vocational training programmes with a fraction of (F (4, 298)= 18.586; p<0.05, adj R2 = 0.190) to the variance of 20.1% of other variables not accounted for in the study. The result revealed the relative contribution of independent variables to dependent variables to dependent measure. From the table, entrepreneurship (β=.0.12), poverty reduction (β=0.11), unemployment reduction (β=0.24) and socio-economic well-being of rural dwellers (β=.0.18) contributed to vocational training programmes. Therefore, the study recommended that Government should not only organize vocational training programmes for young people, but also provide money and equipments to the participants in the scheme promptly to practice what they have learnt by setting up their own business after graduation to spur self –reliance. Graduates of the vocational training programmes should be encouraged to be self-employed by assisting them with soft loans/credit.