摘要:Poverty is largely a rural phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa and the key contributors to poverty are low mean per capita income and its inequitable distributions. The contribution of mean income and inequality to spatial variations in rural poverty were investigated in this study using the 2003/04 National Living Standard Survey by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Shapley Decomposition (SD) techniques. Results showed that across the GPZs, the contributions of mean income to change in poverty rates were higher than inequality (Ly) for both incidence of poverty ( P0 ) and poverty gap ( P1 ). On the other hand, the contribution of mean income to change in severity of poverty ( P2 ) was higher than Ly in North-East ( μ 0.0530; Ly -0.0334); North-West ( μ 0.0844; Ly 0.0429); South-East ( μ -0.0505; Ly -0.0136); South- South ( μ -0.0254; Ly -0.0048); South-West ( μ -0.0450; Ly -0.0201). However, inequality contributed more than mean income in North-Central ( μ 0.0184; Ly 0.0240). The marginal contributions of within-GPZs inequality to poverty indices were higher than between-GPZs inequality.