Socioeconomic Determinants of Youth’s Participation in Rice Production Activities in Kogi and Nasarawa States

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine the socio-economic and institutional factors of youth’s participation in rice production in Kogi and Nasarawa states. Questionnaires were used for data collection while a multi-stage sampling technique was employed to obtain the 372 respondents used for the study. Descriptive statistics and multiple regression analyses were used to achieve the various objectives of the study while the hypothesis of the study was tested using a t-test. The result shows that most of the respondents were male were mostly between the ages of 31 and 35 years. Most of them were married and had a household size of between 1 to 5 people. The result further showed that majority of the respondents had either an OND or NCE. Majority of the youth had between 6 to 10 years of farming experience while most of the respondents have a farm size of between 1 to 3 hectares. The most available production resources to the respondents were herbicides and land. The multiple regression results revealed that marital status, household size and income were significant at 1% probability level. Educational qualification was significant at 5% probability while farm size was significant at 10% probability. It was recommended that the government should make loans and credit available and accessible to youth interested in rice production in the study area. This will help in encouraging more youth to go into rice production, which will improve the level of production and reduce the dependence on imported rice thereby promoting homegrown products.