Abstract
Collective action has been promoted as a strategy to improve the incomes of small scale producers in many developing countries, primarily by reducing transaction costs and improving farmers’ bargaining power. This paper evaluates producers’ perception of collective action initiatives which have been used in Cameroon for the production and marketing of kola nuts. Using a perceptual evaluation and cluster analysis based on interviews with 203 kola producers in western highlands of Cameroon, findings reveal that producers evaluate effectiveness of collective action based on 5 main groups of criteria: reduced transaction costs, new learning and skills acquisition, market and financial status, social networks and status, and unfavorable dimensions. Furthermore, two main types of producers who evaluate the collective initiatives differently are identified: the positive group and the unimpressed group. Higher proportions of women and youth are in the unimpressed group than in the positive group, suggesting that more needs to be done to understand their perspectives and better target collective action initiatives to their needs and circumstances. The paper concludes that promoters of collective action initiatives need to adopt differentiated strategies to enhance its adoption in the study area.
Highlights
Development practitioners are becoming increasingly concerned about improving smallholder farmers’ market access
The loadings measure the contribution or relationship between the observed variables and the unobserved variables To test for the appropriateness of the factor analysis for the scale, The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy (KMO-MSA) was used and all fell within the accepted region of more than 0.5 (Nunnally, 1978)
We argue that the majority of the farmers view collective action positively, differentiated strategies have to be used in order to reach out and promote collective action among farmers who belong to the two groups
Summary
Development practitioners are becoming increasingly concerned about improving smallholder farmers’ market access. This is against the background that market access is seen as one of the important instruments which can be used to improve income and employment (Doward et al, 2003), and subsequently alleviate rural poverty This notwithstanding, smallholder farmers are often at a disadvantage compared to large scale producers who have technology, capital, information and capacity to produce larger volumes which increases their bargaining power (Devaux et al, 2009). After many years of facilitating collective action initiatives in the kola supply chain in Cameroon, there is a need to assess farmers’ perception of the effectiveness and usefulness of such initiatives This is expected to provide information for organizations using collective www.ccsenet.org/jas. The final section provides conclusions and implications for future implementation of collective action activities
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