The Impact of Cooperative membership on Adoption of Modern Technology by Bee farmers in Kenya.

Abstract

The main aim of this research is to examine the impact of cooperative membership on adoption of modern technology by bee farmers in Kenya. This study’s data comes from a bee farmers survey in Baringo County, Kenya using a sampling size of 201 households. Probit, logit and Instrumental variable models were incorporated to test for the estimation of relationships and the information generated imported into the SPSS computer application (SPSS 2015) and STATA MP 17 for statistical analysis. The results show that education has a negative significant predictor of cooperative membership at a 5% significance level. Attaining secondary levels did not contribute to farmers’ decision to join cooperative membership. Older farmers were more likely to join cooperatives, unlike the young farmers. Using neighbors in cooperatives as an instrumental variable, the findings indicate that farmers with neighbors who were already in cooperative membership were more likely to join cooperatives. In addition, the majority of adopters of modern bee farming technologies had access to both credit and markets and reported to have experienced an increase in income from bee farming. The adoption of modern beekeeping technologies, such as protective gears, and honey extractors, enabled the farmers to produce more and better-quality honey, which fetched higher prices in the market. Cooperative membership increased the probability of adopting modern beekeeping technology. As such, the study recommends that cooperatives should provide more incentives and support to their members, such as training, subsidies, quality assurance, and market linkages to promote the adoption of modern bee farming technologies.