No.25 Promoting livelihood diversification among rural farming households in Kenya: What role does farm forestry Farmer Field School play?

Farmer Field School (FFS) is an agricultural extension approach designed to empower participants, enabling them to make adaptive decisions in farming practices under diverse and changing conditions. Because FFS provides participants with farming knowledge and practices of new crops and products, one of the expected effects of FFS is household livelihood diversification, which is seen as a key factor for enhancing the resilience of rural households to climate change impacts. This study empirically investigates the effects of a farm forestry FFS program on the livelihood diversification of rural households and its cascading effects on household vulnerability to climate-related shocks. In doing so, it employs an example of a farm forestry FFS program implemented in two counties in arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) regions in Kenya from 2017 to 2020. In recent times, rural households in ASAL areas of Kenya have suffered from recurrent droughts exacerbated by climate change. We collected information through key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and a household survey of 344 households with and without graduates of the FFS program. The collected data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively through a propensity score matching analysis to assess the relationship between FFS graduation and household livelihood diversification. Further, the relationship between household livelihood diversification and household losses from climate-related shocks was analysed using a simple multivariate regression analysis. The results of the propensity score analysis indicated that FFS graduate households have greater livelihood diversification in terms of both the number of income types and the number of agricultural, forestry, and livestock products they sold, compared with the counterfactual case where a household did not have an FFS graduate. The subsequent multivariate regression analysis showed that the diversity in household sales of agricultural, forestry, and livestock products was inversely correlated with the losses households suffered from recent events of droughts and crop diseases/pests. These results suggest that the farm forestry FFS facilitated participating households to diversify their livelihood, which is deemed beneficial for enhancing household resilience to climate-related threats such as droughts and crop diseases/pests.

Keywords: Farmer Field School, livelihood diversification, drought, household vulnerability to shocks, propensity score method