Locational Efficiency of Local Government Headquarters as Regional Development Centres in Rivers State, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper examined the efficiency of Local Government Headquarters in Rivers State first, in terms of their location as regional development centres and secondly in terms of their location in relation to their rural communities as well as in the provision, distribution and accessibility of services to the inhabitants of these Local Government Areas(LGAs).The study covers the twenty-three LGAs of  the State in which both the linear measurement of the distance and transport costs  between the LGAs Headquarters and the various communities and their coordinates were obtained. Copies of questionnaires were distributed across 242 communities, while Geo-referenced maps, land size of the study area, GPS and Arc-G1S 10.1 software were also used. The access opportunity model statistical technique used in analyzing the level of accessibility to administrative services located in the headquarters by the rural communities revealed variations in the accessibility to administrative services in the state with accessibility level of 18.25 which is less than 16.00 UNO access radius. Interaction between the LGAs headquarters and its rural communities also decreases in intensity and frequency as distance between them increases. The paper thus recommends that the distance of the communities to their Local Government Headquarters should be within convenient access radius preferably 16 kilometers and affordable transport cost.

Key words: Local Government Area Headquarters, location efficiency, regional centres, accessibility.