Determinants of smallholders farmers’ participation in collective marketing of maize in the central highlands of Kenya

Collective marketing has been proposed as a solution to the problem of poor access tomarkets in developing nations. However, smallholders’ market participation is still limited.This study assessed farmers’ perception of the benefits and challenges in collectivemarketing, and identified the determinants of smallholder farmers’ participation incollective marketing of maize from 126 households in the central highlands of Kenya.Logistic regression model was used to analyze factors explaining farmers’ participation incollective marketing. The key benefits of collective marketing were better prices and lowcost of inputs, while the main challenges were poor infrastructure, disagreement amongmembers and lack of credit. Gender of household head, years of farming experience, trainingon market information search, keeping records, ability to search market information,marketing group size, extension contact frequency and group meeting frequency weresignificantly associated with farmers participation in collective marketing. Participation incollective marketing could be improved by targeting women already organized in groups,offering training to households on record keeping, enhanced extension contacts, improvingmarketing group operations and searching for markets.