Socio Economic Factors Influencing Adoption of Improved Gum Arabic Seedlings among Farmers in the Sahelian Zone of Borno State, Nigeria

The study analysed the socio economic factors influencing adoption of improved gum Arabic seedlings among farmers in the sahelian zone of Borno State, Nigeria. The data for the study were mainly generated from farming households through the use of structured and pre-tested interview schedules. Multi-stage, purposive and random sampling techniques were employed to select 321 representative farming households that were used for this study. Both descriptive (frequencies, means and percentages) and inferential (logit regression) statistics were used to analyse the data collected for this study. The result showed that most (49.20%) of the respondents had farmer cooperatives as their source of gum Arabic seedlings in the study area. This is closely followed by fellow farmers representing 40.18% of the respondents in the study area. The logit regression analysis indicated that the socio-economic characteristics which had significant influence (P≤0.10) on the adoption of improved gum Arabic seedlings by farmers include; marital status and household size. The study recommends that awareness creation should be mounted through extension education approach to enlighten the public on the skills, knowledge, techniques and benefits of the adoption of improved gum Arabic seedlings in the study area. Farmers in the study area should also be encouraged to form gum Arabic agroforestry cooperatives in order to enable them to take advantage of government and non-governmental programmes, such as provision of credit facilities and technologies etc.