Entrepreneurial training and smallholder farmers value chains improvement: evidence from groundnut value chain in Lira District, Northern Uganda

Abstract

Integrating entrepreneurial skills among smallholders who constitute the majority of farmers in the agricultural sector in Uganda is one of the ways of transforming the smallholder farmers from subsistence to market oriented, profit driven and commercialized farmers. However, there has not been any deliberate government or private sector program designed to build the capacity of farmers by integrating entrepreneurial skills in their value chain activities. The main objective of this study was to assess the overall contribution of integrating entrepreneurial skills in enhancing productivity and revenues of the smallholder farmer groundnut value chain in northern Uganda. The specific objectives of the study were to (i) characterize the socio-economic and demographic attributes of the entrepreneurial and non–entrepreneurial smallholder groundnut farmers (ii) determine the critical entrepreneurial skills that influence farm revenue from the groundnut value chain among the smallholder farmers determine the factors influencing holder farmers’ decision to participate in the entrepreneurial skills training and (iii) determine the effect of entrepreneurial skills training on smallholder household revenue from the groundnut enterprise. Results showed that the most critical entrepreneurial skills identified for enhancing household income were value addition followed by marketing. The major factors that influenced decision to participate in the entrepreneurial skills training were age of the farmers, annual income of the farmers and farm size of the farmers. Farmers who were empowered with entrepreneurial skills had their revenue from groundnut enterprises increase relatively higher compared to farmers without entrepreneurial skills training. This study therefore recommends that smallholder farmers in the country be empowered with entrepreneurial skills through training since this leads to increased farm revenue.