Pattern of Management Interventions’ Adoption and their Effect on Productivity of Indigenous Chicken in Kenya

Despite intensive dissemination of management intervention package, there is low productivity and commercialization of indigenous chicken (Gallus domesticus) in Africa. The management intervention package comprises feed supplementation, housing, chick rearing, brooding and vaccination. Smallholder farmers often regard these management interventions as costly, risky, unprofitable, and inaccessible and that they require high technical knowledge. This paper emphasizes the role of management intervention package in productivity of smallholder indigenous chicken farmers. Principal Component Analysis combined with Cluster analysis was used to determine three homogenous groups adopting management interventions. The three groups are; feed supplementation and vaccination adopters, feed supplementation and brooding adopters and Full management intervention package adopters. The effect of these adopted management interventions was then analyzed using log linear regression model which takes the form of Cobb-Douglas production function. The results indicated that farmers who had adopted full management intervention package as recommended by extension had higher productive performance than farmers who modified and selectively adopted components of management intervention package. Other socio-economic factors that significantly influenced productivity were farm production assets, expenditure on feeds, labour, access to extension, group membership and female gender. The study recommends the formulation and implementation of pro-poor policies aimed at improving socio-economic conditions of the smallholders to enable them fully adopt the recommended management intervention package. This would increase productivity of indigenous chicken thereby improving food and income security in rural areas of Africa.