IMPACT EVALUATION OF ANCHOR BORROWERS’ PROGRAMME AMONG RICE FARMERS IN EKITI STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

In a bid to achieve rice self-sufficiency in Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria initiated the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP), aimed at enhancing rice production in the country. To boost rice output and processing capacity, the ABP seeks to facilitate input provision and economic connections between smallholder farmers and reputable large-scale processors. Consequently, this research assessed the impact of the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme on small-scale rice farmers in Ekiti state, Nigeria, utilizing structured questionnaires to gather data from 384 farmers. Analysis of the data involved Descriptive statistics, Gross Margin analysis, and application of the Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model. The results showed that majority of the rice farmers were economically active and have fairly large household size regardless of their ABP participation status. However, the ABP participants’ average farm size is larger than the ABP non-participants. Similarly, the ABP participants’ average yield/ha and gross margin is higher than those of the ABP non-participants. The actual and counterfactual scenarios estimates revealed that ABP increased the yield/ha and the gross margin of the participants by 33.3% and 20.6% respectively, while the potential increase in the yield/ton and the gross margin of the ABP non-participants would have been 47.9% and 38.7% respectively if they had participated in ABP. The ESR results showed that awareness of ABP, education, household size and availability of land influenced participation in ABP. Similarly, the size of farm cultivated, farming experience and use of improved rice seed variety increased gross margin while marital status and upland production ecology reduced gross margin of the ABP participants. On the other hand, household size and size of land cultivated increased the gross margin while use of old rice variety and upland production ecology reduced the gross margin of the ABP non-participants. The study concludes that programmes that will give more publicity to ABP, educational programmes for farmers, and policy that will give farmers access to land for cultivation to enable more farmers to participate in ABP. Additionally, government through the extension agents should organize refresher capacity building training for rice farmers particularly ABP upland rice farmers on the optimum use of production inputs in order to avoid incurring unnecessary cost that can reduce their gross margin.