Abstract:
The National Agriculture and Livestock Extension Programme (NALEP) utilizethe Shifting Focal Area Approach (SFAA), to build the capacity of Common Interest Groups (CIGs) for performance improvement. A number of institutional factors play a role in determining how the CIGs perform. NALEP was designed to explore some of the institutional factors which include access to agricultural credit, commodity markets, and training among others so as to improve the performance of CIGs. Inspite of this, the performance of CIGs in NALEP focal areas within Gilgil division has remained low. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of selected institutional factors on the organizational performance of CIGs. The study used survey methodto describe the characteristics of the sample. It employed a stratified proportionate random sample of 120 farmers drawn from 15 CIG in Gilgil division of Naivasha district. The groups engaged in diverse enterprises broadly categorized into crop and milk production on a small scale. A predesigned structured questionnaire was used to collect ordinal and categorical data covering performance, credit access, market access and training. The questionnaire was administered by the researcher to 8randomly selected farmers from each group identified as CIG. These data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17, using descriptive statistics (frequencies, means, and standard deviations) and inferential statistics (multiple regression, spearman rank correlation coefficients and Chi-square). Hypotheses were tested at 5% level of significance.Key findings from the study indicated that access to commodity markets and access to agricultural credit significantly influenced performance of the CIGs while access to training despite being seen as useful and applicable did not significantly contribute to the performance of the CIGs. CIG performance was measured by level of enterprise production, level of cohesion, group leadership skills and level of farmer empowerment. The results of this study may be useful to the ministry of agriculture and NALEP to improve on the performance of CIGs in Gilgil Division and other areas through proper design and implementation of agricultural extension services.
