Assessment of women involvement in agricultural activities in Kuje and Abuja municipal area councils of federal capital territory, Abuja, Nigeria

The Federal Government of Nigeria in 2011 launched the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) as its Vision and Mission to promote the growth and development of Nigeria. The agenda clearly has many promising hope for Nigerians. However, like many programmes of past governments, designed to address the structural imbalance in legislation, policy and governance, between men and women, no pragmatic and concrete effort is made to address the anomalies. Therefore, this paper seeks to bring to the fore women’s involvement in agricultural activities in Kuje and Abuja Municipal Area Councils, Abuja, Nigeria. A multi stage sampling procedure was employed in selecting the respondents. Two Area Councils (AC), from the six Area Councils in the Federal Capital Territory Abuja, were purposively selected due to the high number of women involved in farming in the area councils. Twenty percent of the registered women farmers were randomly sampled from six villages in each of the selected Area Council (AC), giving a total of 240 respondents. Structured questionnaire was administered to obtain information from registered women farmers purposively selected from a register of women farmers in the area. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyze the data. Results revealed that 45% of the women were between 31-40 years, 82.9% were married and 78% had formal education. Out of 24 agricultural activities engaged in by the women only six variables, namely, fish farming (mean=2.5), agro forestry products (mean =2.6), fish salting (mean 2.2), fish smoking (2.4), shea butter processing (mean=2.4) and carrying of farm produce home (mean=2.5) above the cut-off point mean of 2.0 were most practised activities. The t-test showed that mean involvement in agricultural activities of women farmers from Kuje (29.1) and Municipal (28.5) AC were not significantly different at 5% of probability. The Logit Regression model shows that cultural beliefs significantly influenced women’s involvement in agricultural activities at 1% level of probability while age, income, household size and extension contact had significant influence at 5% level of probability. Credit was also significant at 10% level of probability. The correlation was highly significant between women involvement in agricultural activities and the following variables: age, household size, and years of experience in farming. It is recommended that clear governmental policies, national guidelines, strategies, and plans for the involvement of more women in agricultural activities, be formulated and implemented.