Abstract

This study was guided by the desire to advance whether concerted effort could enhance the creativity and innovations of women towards empowerment. Other purposes include: establishing the level of empowerment towards attaining good growth in building the informal sector economy and enhancing the status of women in Oke Ogun zone of Nigeria; determining the problems facing the creative abilities of women in improving their knowledge and skills through training. This study adopted descriptive survey design of ex-post facto type. Proportionate and simple random sampling techniques were used to select 128 women entrepreneurs as participants from four (4) purposively selected skills. Women Creativity and Innovations for Empowerment Questionnaire with reliability co-efficient of 0.86 was used as the main instrument to elicit responses from participants while 4 Focus Group Discussion sessions (FGDs) complemented the Questionnaire. The study indicated that there is a significant combined effect of women’s socio-empowerment and women’s economic empowerment on women’s creativity and innovations (F (2,111) = 3.349; R=239, R²= .057, Adj. R²=0.040; P=0.05). However, the Nigerian government is yet to advance a committed political will towards enhancing the efforts of women through the creation of good supportive measures, and an enabling environment to reduce poverty, create job opportunities and develop her human resources. It is recommended that the Nigerian government should demonstrate a good political will in poverty alleviation programmes, women’s social groups and business organizations should be geared towards pulling labour and resources together to maximize labour productivity, information and social network which will lead to good growth of the informal sector.

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