| dc.description.abstract | It is likely that the development of an economy depends upon,
and in part consists of, the growth of useful skills, knowledge
and information among its people. The question posed by this study
is the extent to which the productivity of Kenya smallholders is
affected by their exposure to educative services that stand to
enhance those human resource factors.
The school system in countries such as Kenya is grossly
over-supplying the non-farm labour market. The result is that
the vast majority of those leaving school, and certainly the
incremental leavers resulting from an expansion of the system,
must be employed (if at all) on the farms. Whether schooling
raises the productivity of farmers, is thus the central question
in evaluating social returns to investment in the system. The
use of a disequilibrium "modern" sector wage is unlikely to shed
light on this issue.
The other area of investment policy that motivates this study
is that of agriculture. Where the productivity of that sector
is dependent on the decision-making, and therefore the abilities
of individual farmers, efforts to improve those abilities are
crucial components of a development strategy. Rational growth
and investment in such institutions and agencies is not possible
without some measure of farmer productivity changes that are
attributable to them.
The data base for the empirical estimations of this study is an
intensive survey of Kenya smallholders carried out by, and with the
cooperation of the Kenya Ministry of Finance and Planning. The survey
involved opening and closing inventories and monthly visits to some
1500 farms over the period of a year. The data include information
about assets, production, costs, etc ; broken down crop and livestock
enterprise on each farm. In addition, a complete profile of
the farmer's human resource characteristics was collected. This includes
not only his formal education, age and experience, but his
exposure to a range of educative services aimed directly at farmers.
While a number of serious difficulties had to be overcome with the
validation of the data set, it does provide a wealth of economic information
for empirical research.
The approach of this study is that of examining the production
relations of the farm firm, and testing the extent to which educative
variables can be shown to affect economic performance. Three different
kinds of production functions are developed and fitted; each is designed
to shed light on a. different aspect of the farmer's technical
and allocative efficiency. The first is the conventional,single
commodity type of engineering function, with human resource factors
formulated to account for "neutral" shifts in productivity. The
second is a family of aggregate earnings functions in which educative
inputs either increase earnings for a given resource use, or change the
intensity with which particular physical factors are used. The third
is a set of value added or profit functions in which each of the
farmer's physical factors is treated either as fixed or variable. When
a factor is treated as variable, the net earnings or profit consequences of its use are attributed to the human resource characteristics
of the farmer. The extent to which those characteristics
enhance the economic efficiency of the firm can then be tested.
The findings of this study support the notion that educational
investments are seriously out of balance in Kenya. Applied educative
services to farmers have been relatively neglected while the development
of formal schooling has, from an economic point of view, been
grossly overemphasized. While schooling may raise the innovativeness
of producers once they are committed to farming, it generally appears
to disorient them from their farms and thus have a negative effect on
performance. While each of the applied educative services has its own
institutional and quality problems, resulting in different levels of
effectiveness, such services are shown to be a significant source of
farm productivity. They have clearly received inadequate attention
and investment. The farmer's experience tends to be his most useful
source of decision-making knowledge. | en |
