Students’ Perception of West African Agricultural Productivity Programme Adopted Schools Programme in Oyo State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study examined students’ perception of the effectiveness of adopted school programme in Oyo State. Primary data were collected using structured questionnaires from 90 respondents using multi-stage procedure. Data were subjected to both descriptive and inferential statistics at p=0.05. The results show that 72.2% of the respondents were between 15-16 years, 51.1% were in SS2 and mostly females (58.1%). Also, 48.9% owned farm at home and 61.1% had farming background. The students were exposed to maize (77.8%), cassava (77.8%), poultry (66.7%), fishery (44.4%) and rabbitry (44.4%) production. Major constraints were lack of interest (χ=2.00), inadequate equipment in agricultural laboratory ( χ=1.93) and lack of home garden (χ=1.82). More than half (55.6%) of them were favourably disposed to the programme while respondents’ farming background (r=3.740, p ≤ 0.05) was significantly related to their perception of the programme. It was recommended that West African Agricultural Productivity Programme officials should focus more attention on educating students in areas that are more technologically inclined such as in animal breeding, vaccination and crop processing instead of only in areas involving manual labour such as in planting, weeding and sanitation of pen.

Keywords: West African Agricultural Productivity Programme, Adopted schools project, student farmers.