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Youth participation in agriculture is one of the key enablers of achieving global food security and nutrition. Further if youth are engaged in agriculture there will be increase in economic growth and attainment of environmental sustainability. This is because youth account for one of the highest populated age group (24%) in the world. However, countries including Kenya continue to battle food security and nutrition as evident in the Big 4 Agenda of 2017. There are several factors contributing to this state of affairs including low participation of youth in agriculture. This research work investigated the influence of attitudinal traits on youth participation in agriculture. Five attitudinal acuities were investigated to determine how they affect youth participation in agriculture. They are; agriculture is labour intensive, agriculture is dirty enterprise and non-professional in nature, agricultural returns take too long to yield and agriculture is a domain for the elderly and school dropouts. A descriptive survey was carried out from a sample of three hundred and eighty five youth selected from seven counties in Kenya. Data was collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression model. Results from the study indicated that all the attitudinal traits considered influence youth participation in agriculture to some extent (0.176 correlation coefficient). Majority (32. 9%) thought that agriculture take long to yield returns while the perception that agriculture is dirty and non-professional had the least influence (16.4%) of youth participation in agriculture. Training and sensitization of youth, provision of incentives or financial support to youth and formation of youth groups were found to be the most effective ways of promoting positive attitude among the youth towards agriculture.
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In-Text Citation: (Mutinda et al., 2021)
To Cite this Article: Mutinda, J., Chepngeno, V., & Mugendi, T. (2021). Attitudinal Individualities Affecting Youth Participation in Agriculture: A Case of Seven Selected Counties in Kenya. International Journal Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 11(5), 227–243.
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