Impact of the Meru KOPIA project on poultry farmers’ income in Meru County, Kenya

Abstract

Most farming households in Kenya keep indigenous chickens in scavenging systems characterized by low productivity. In response to this, the Korea Program on International Agriculture (KOPIA) center in Nairobi collaborated with the County Government of Meru to disseminate localized technologies and provide technical support to indigenous poultry farmers using the model village approach. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of the project on participating poultry farmers’ income in Meru County, Kenya, as promoted by the KOPIA. Descriptive cross-sectional survey research was adopted to achieve the objectives of the paper. Data was collected from beneficiaries and a control group through a survey of 236 households using researcher-administered questionnaires sampled from a population of 400 farmers drawn from the 4 participating villages. The study was based on the rational choice theory. Propensity score matching was used to compute the average treatment effect on the treated. Using the nearest neighbor, caliper-based, and kernel-based matching methods, the results showed evidence that program beneficiaries increased their annual income from poultry production, ranging from Kshs 66,616 to 81,674. Being located in Mbaria, Ng’onyi, and Ntalami model villages, the number of livestock enterprises, the number of eggs sold, the number of hens sold, and egg production per hen influenced the impact of the project. The study recommends the establishment of more model villages so as to spread the benefits to a wider area. Future efforts should include addressing constraints in marketing and group cohesion so as to increase the benefits to the participating farmers. Assisting farmers to form a marketing cooperative will not only increase market participation but also benefit farmers from collective procurement of inputs as well as credit for enterprise expansion.