Impact of farmer groups on crop enterprise productivity and economic welfare of smallholder farmers in South Kivu territories, Democratic Republic of Congo

Abstract

In spite of the efforts and the emergence of numerous group based interventions for technology dissemination, the productivity and technology uptake levels of smallholder farmers of South Kivu, democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) still remain low. The objectives of this study were therefore to describe the changes in input use, value of production and incomes, determine changes in institutional linkages resulting from group based interventions, quantify the economic gains from the group interventions and finally to determine the factors that influenced the economic gain. Data was collected using structured interview schedule. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to obtain a sample of 360 smallholder farmers (120 farmers from each territory) .The three territories (Ngweshe, Mwenga and Kabare) were purposively selected because of the interventions that were implemented therein, their variability in productivity and income among smallholders. Descriptive statistics (mean comparisons) was used to address objective 1 and objective 2. Economic surplus model was used to address objective 3 and then OLS regression used to address objective 4.Data were analyzed using SPSS software. The findings revealed significant differences in the use of top dressing fertilizer, productivity (value of production) and number of meetings attended among the group and non group farmers(at p<0.05). From the OLS regression, it was established that the factors that significantly influence economic gain were credit (-0.415), radio farmer programmes (0.004) and off-farm income (0.561) at p<0.05.The differences in input use levels, value of production and economic gains between group and non group farmers underscore the importance of farmer groups in improving productivity and welfare of smallholders in Congo. The study therefore recommends policy interventions to increase credit access by farmers and information access via farmer radio programmes as well as promotion of projects that incorporate more income generating activities along with the technology package to make the new innovations affordable to the resource poor farmers.