Factors Influencing Smallholder Farmers Participation in IFAD-Community Based Agricultural and Rural Development Project in Katsina State

Abstract

This study assessed Factors Influencing smallholder farmers’ participation in IFAD-Community Based Agricultural and Rural Development Project in Katsina State. Data for the study were obtained by the use of structured questionnaire. Multistage sampling technique was employed to select the 698 respondents. In the first stage, a purposive sampling technique was used to select one village area that had the highest participating farmers out of the three village areas in each LGA. The second stage involved the use of proportionate random sampling technique to select 12% of the population. This gave a total of three hundred and fourty nine (349) participating farmers from the twelve participating village areas. Also, 349 non-participating farmers were selected from neighbouring communities using proportionate random sampling. Descriptive statistics and logit regression analysis were used to analyze the data. The result shows that 23% of the participating farmers were between the ages of 46-50 years and 91% were males. The result also shows that level of education with coefficient value of (-0.309), household size (-0.041), farm size (0.801), membership of cooperative (0.547) and extension contact (-0.283) were the factors influencing smallholder farmers participation in the project. The result further shows that inadequate capital, inadequate agricultural credits and inadequate storage facilities were the major constraints to participation in the programme. The study recommends that extension workers should assist farmers to form viable co-operative associations and where they are in existence, efforts should be made to strengthen them for easy access to credit, farm inputs and markets for their agricultural products.

Keywords: Small holder farmer participation, Rural development and extension workers.