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Agriculture And Livelihood Diversification In Kenyan Rural Households
Author(s): Kimenju,Simon;Tschirley,David
Introduction
Governments throughout the developing world have a keen and understandable interest in
diversifying their rural economies. Yet to achieve rapid growth in incomes in rural areas and
in the economy as a whole, Kenya must go through an agricultural transformation. In this
transformation, individual farms shift from highly diversified, subsistence-oriented
production towards more specialized production oriented towards the market or other systems
of exchange. This paper develops a conceptual model that distinguishes between different
types of economic diversification and links these to the process of agricultural
transformation; it then uses Tegemeo’s 11 year panel (1997 to 2007) of rural smallholder
households to search for evidence as to how far Kenya has moved in the agricultural
transformation. Within this general research purpose, the paper additionally searches for
evidence that households have responded in expected fashion to the liberalization of the
maize sector that began in 1994, just prior to the first survey in this panel data set. Analysis
suggests that Kenya is at an early stage of the agricultural transformation but that it may be at
a key point where it shifts from increasing diversification to increasing specialization. This
“change in the direction of change” has important policy implications, which the paper
outlines.
Language: English
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