Traits Affecting Household Marketing Decisions in Rural Kenya

Katherine Baldwin, Vanessa DeVeau, Kenneth Foster and Maria Marshall

No 6445, 2008 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2008, Orlando, Florida from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: While many contemporary development programs with regard to Sub-Saharan Africa’s pastoralists promote improved livestock marketing as a way out of poverty, they also fail to take into account the multi-functionality of livestock within these communities, and thus are doomed to failure. While livestock are a main source of income for the pastoralist household, they also serve a purpose as a store of wealth, food source, and status symbol. Furthermore, cattle and smallstock (sheep and goats) fulfill each function to a different degree. Since livestock are so multi-functional, marketing projects could better achieve their objectives if they had a more accurate picture of what motivates household livestock sale decisions. To get a better understanding of why livestock are sold in one community of Central Kenya, we regressed household offtake rate of both cattle and smallstock against certain household characteristics, including number of household members, number of children, education, and employment. Additionally, we used a logit model to determine if those same characteristics affect the overall decision to sell instead of just the offtake rate. We found that employment or self-employment of at least one household member significantly affected both offtake rate and sale decision. In addition, the number of household members and number of children in school had varying affects on cattle and smallstock offtake rates. The results regarding smallstock suggest that they are considered a more liquid asset, so perhaps future programs should target increasing the profitability of smallstock production as opposed to cattle production. Overall, our analysis shows that community livestock sales are motivated by factors other than price, and as such should be considered in the design of any future marketing programs.

Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-dev
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/6445/files/469916a.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea08:6445

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.6445

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2008 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2008, Orlando, Florida from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().