Determinants of farmer empowerment in agriculture in Kenya: A Tobit approach

Empowerment in agriculture plays an important role in improving food and nutrition security. Understanding the determinants of farmer empowerment in agriculture is vital in improving the targeting of key indicators that matter for policy and practice. Most of the existing studies focus on female empowerment, leaving out the equally important aspect of male empowerment. We compute empowerment in agriculture index for male and female farmers and assess its determinants by applying the Tobit and Logit models on cross-sectional data of 835 farmers in Kenya. We find that only 11% of the farmers were empowered, 5% of whom were female. Econometric results show that gender had a positive and significant association with empowerment in agriculture and male and female farmers benefited to varying extents even from the same determinants. Thus, empowerment initiatives should compensate for such differences by targeting male and female farmers. Moreover, commercialization, access to government extension services and value of assets were positively and significantly associated with empowerment in agriculture indicating extra pathways through which empowerment in agriculture could be enhanced.