Abstract

Farmers in Kenya's drylands have difficulty accessing farm production resources and in consequence farm productivity is low. It is therefore important to find strategies for improving access to these scarce resources to help farmers use them efficiently. This paper analyses and compares the technical efficiency of five groups of small farms affected by five different agricultural interventions. The aim of the study was to identify intervention strategies that significantly improve farm efficiency. Data envelopment analysis was used to compute farm-level average technical efficiencies for each of the intervention groups. The results showed that average technical efficiency was highest for the farms that had participated in an irrigation intervention. The findings suggest that the strategies promoted by this intervention, such as access to irrigation, inputs and markets, have the most significant effect on farm efficiency

No abstract

The study on this paper seeks to identify intervention design(s) which have had an impact on household food security in Kenya's drylands, and could be replicated in other places with similar conditions. Five different ex-post interventions in the drylands of Kenya were evaluated using descriptive statistics and econometric models. It was shown that the intervention project design which had integrated provision of irrigation water and access to markets for both farm inputs and produce in its development strategies had an impact through improvement in the levels and stability of household incomes. Access to markets included institutional organization and provision of transport. In conclusion, food security policy in the drylands should focus on creating an enabling environment for farmers in terms of market organization and provision of irrigation infrastructure.