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The primary purpose of this study is to assess the factors that influence households’ choice of cooking fuel in Bauchi State, Nigeria.

In total, 750 samples were selected using multistage area cluster sampling, of which 539 responses were analysed. Multinomial logit model was used to estimate the factors that determine a household’s main cooking fuel choice in Bauchi State, Nigeria.

The result has shown that income, location, price of firewood, hours of electricity supply and home ownership are among the factors that have a significant impact on influencing the type of cooking fuel to be adopted by households.

The study cannot offer any explanation about the influence of time dimension on the pattern of household cooking fuel choice in the study area.

Implementation of policies to increase the income of households, ensuring the availability of clean cooking fuel source and the increase in the price of firewood will encourage households to switch from using firewood to using cleaner fuel sources such as kerosene, electricity and gas.

This study has contributed to the existing literature on household energy choice by conducting a micro-level analysis of households’ cooking fuel choice in Bauchi State where a similar study has not been conducted. The study developed approximately 13 hypotheses (out of which two were found to be irrelevant) and added one new variable to test the impact of the neighbourhood’s source of cooking fuel on households’ cooking fuel choice.

It is generally agreed that shortage of food, which is one of the main problems bedevilling Sub-Saharan African region, can be eliminated via the adoption of modern agricultural production technology, one of which is chemical fertiliser. The purpose of this paper is to assess the factors that can be used to improve the intensity of fertiliser use in rural Sub-Saharan African countries, taking Tofa, a local government area in Kano State, Nigeria, as the case study.

The study adopted a two-stage sampling technique. In the first stage, four districts were chosen using a simple random sampling technique from the list of the 15 districts in the local government area, namely, Tofa, Langel, Lambu and Doka. In the second stage, 25 farmer households were systematically selected from each of the selected communities. Moreover, Tobit Regression model was used to examine and analyse the influence of some socio-economic factors on fertiliser use intensity.

To improve the rate of fertiliser use intensity, farmers need to be exposed to skills and training on some off-farm jobs to raise the farmers’ income to enable them to afford more fertiliser. The study finds that income, contact with extension agent, age of the farmer and method of fertiliser application have positive significant impacts on the intensity of fertiliser use. On the other hand, price of fertiliser was found to have negative impact on the intensity of using fertiliser in the study area. Furthermore, based on the data obtained from the selected samples, the average rate of fertiliser application in Tofa local government area during the crop season of 2011/2012 was 25 kg per hectare.

Policies that will strengthen the farmers’ contact with extension agents throughout the farming periods should be adopted. Also, farmers need to be exposed with skills and training on some off farm jobs to raise the farmers’ income to enable them afford more fertiliser.