Unmet Needs for Care and Support for the Elderly in Nigeria: Gaps in Experiences and Expectations of the Aged in Ilesa, South-West Nigeria Akanni Ibukun Akinyemi 1 Ambrose Akinlo Department of Demography and Social Statistics Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria 1 Corresponding author: akakanni@yahoo.ca Abstract The study is focused on understanding the broad issues of care and support of the elderly with a view to explaining factors influencing the gaps in their expectations and experiences. This is an empirical attempt with a view to understanding and under- scoring the importance and limitation of the domains of support from core family members (spouses and children) within the available support networks for the elderly. The study utilized primary dataset including quantitative and qualitative data collected in Ijesa communities in South-west, Nigeria. The findings showed that children and spouses ranked highest among sources of support networks rated by the elderly for five patterns of support identified. Logistic regression results showed that individual variables including age, education, family of orientation, and living in same town with children to a large extent determine level of unmet need for support. The study concluded that personal attributes rather than other social variables are important determinants of high level of unmet need for elderly. Keywords: unmet needs, care and support, elderly, Ilesa, Nigeria Introduction Increasing trend in the population of the aged or elderly has been a big challenge for many developed countries. Their prevailing high life expectancy and low total fertility rates, hovering around the replacement level of 2.1, have given rise to a population structure with a large proportion of the aged relative to the working population. The steady increase of life expectancy in the developing countries coupled with gradual decline in fertility implies that the aging phenomenon deserves more well-structured attention. Currently, the elderly account for almost 5 percent of over 200 million populations in the sub- Saharan Africa region; it is projected that the elderly will constitute about 10 percent of the over 600 million population in 2050 in the sub-region (UN, 2002; UN 2012). Nigeria, with over 170 million population, is a youthful population with a progressive growth rate of 2.8% and a median age of 17.3 for males and 18.4 for females (NPC, 2008), and about 45% of the country’s total population are under 15 years of age. This broad description of the country as a youthful