Factors influencing grain legume technology adoption across Sub-Saharan Africa

This thesis was written under N2Africa supervision and with N2Africa data.

The population of Sub-Saharan African regions have grown from 230 million to 811 million people in fifty years’ time and are expected to grow even faster in the upcoming years. To secure this population with enough food, systematic changes to the African food system are required. To achieve this, improved grain legume seeds and practices have been introduced to farmer households in various regions across Sub-Saharan Africa to enhance crop yield and soil fertility. But research indicated that the adoption rates of these technologies lacked behind expectations. Because of this, this research investigated the average adoption rate across Sub- Saharan Africa. Next to this it investigated whether there are explanatory factors accounting for this adoption rate across Sub-Saharan Africa. This is investigated through meta-analysis. A first selection was made on 87 abstracts and keywords in the timeslot 2000-2018. After which 17 contributions with a total of 27 cases and 9 explanatory factors remained for further analysis. This study contains data from contributions across Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria. The samples of all contributions varied from 140 to 2732 households. From the selection, coding and extraction of the data, it could be concluded that mostly external explanatory factors were examined in grain legume technology adoption across studies. Personal or motivational factors have not been researched in great detail. Also the results come from 10 contributions in Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa and data from 7 contributions in Western Africa. The results show an average adoption rate of 41.42% across Sub-Saharan Africa. An heterogeneity test showed that this result was not solely due to chance. To examine whether the 9 explanatory factors have an influence on the adoption rate across Sub-Saharan Africa weighted z-scores, weighted averages and a binomial test were executed on the coefficients of the explanatory factors. The results show that four explanatory factors: livestock, extension contact, distance to market and farm size have a proven effect on the adoption decision across Sub-Saharan regions. Of which extension contact and farm size have a proven positive effect on adoption. Meaning that the use of extension contact and a larger farm size seem to enhance the adoption of grain legume technologies across Sub-Saharan Africa.