Determinants of Aquaculture Productivity Among Small Holder Farmers in Bungoma County, Kenya

Abstract

The world fish demand is steadily rising as result of low supply thus the need to intensively promote aquaculture. Concerted efforts by the Kenyan government and stakeholders have been in place to promote commercial aquaculture. However, despite the effort there is still a big gap between supply and demand. This was an explanatory study that sought to investigate the determinants of aquaculture productivity among small holder farmers in Bungoma County, Kenya. The study targeted a population of 428 households with ponds in the study area. Using Yamane formular, 207 households were sampled for the study. Sampling of respondents was through purposive, multistage and simple random techniques. A Cobb-Douglas production function was fitted into a stochastic frontier model and analyzed by means of Maximum Likelihood Estimation to determine the efficiency of aquaculture enterprise. Descriptive statistics on the other hand was analyzed through tables and graphs using SPSS. Generally, the study found out that aquaculture in Bungoma is largely semi-intensive in nature. Access to credit, scale of operations, resource support and availability of other sources of household income were found to be significant (p< 0.05) predictors of aquaculture farming. Therefore, there is need to increase credit access for farmers as a way of mitigating for the lack of financial resources for investment.