Abstract:
Household’s participation in out-grower scheme and investor farm employment as well as household socioeconomic characteristics has the potential of improving livelihood outcomes. However, scientific debates on the factors influencing household livelihood outcomes have not been conclusive. This paper aims at examining the factors influencing household livelihood outcomes. The paper adopted a cross-sectional research design whereby exploratory sequential research strategy was adopted whereby a total of 376 respondents were involved in the survey. It also used descriptive statistics and multiple linear regressions to analyze quantitative data analysis while qualitative data were subjected to the content analysis. The results show that age, education, household size, land size, group membership and livelihood strategies influenced positively and significantly household livelihood outcomes at 5% level of significance. Participation in out-grower scheme reduced ability to improve livelihood outcome at 5% level of significance. Similarly, participation in farm wage employment reduced ability to improve livelihood outcome but it was not significant. The article concludes that household heads’ socio-economic characteristics influenced livelihood outcomes than large-scale agricultural investment factors. Therefore, the article recommends strategies like a win-win situation to reverse direction of the influence of large-scale agricultural investment on household livelihood outcomes.
