OPEN DEFECATION IN NIGERIA: A BOX-JENKINS ARIMA APPROACH

Economics

Surprisingly, in this 21st century, the practice of open defecation has continued unabated in Nigeria (Ngwu, 2017). In this study, which is the first of its kind in Nigeria, the Box-Jenkins ARIMA model was applied in analyzing open defecation. The data was collected from the online World Bank data base and covers the period 2000 – 2017. The out-of-sample forecasts cover the period 2018 – 2022. The diagnostics tests employed in this study show that the open defection series under consideration is an I (1) variable. The study finally presents the ARIMA (4, 1, 0) as the optimal model in forecasting the number of people practicing open defecation in Nigeria. The model, through the residual ADF tests, and the inverse roots of the AR/MA polynomials; has been shown to be quite stable and suitable for forecasting and control of open defecation in Nigeria. The results of the study indicate that by 2022 the number of open defecators will be approximately 17.8% of the total population. The study offers a two-fold policy recommendation for consideration by the government of Nigeria.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.