Determinants Of Milk Market Participation And Viabilty Of Community Milk Cooling Plants In Bungoma And Kakamega Counties, Kenya

Several community milk cooling plants were constructed and equipped in Western Kenya counties through joint funding of the World-Bank and the Government of Kenya between the years 2008 to 2016 to promote milk production and marketing. A recent study revealed that utilization of these milk cooling plants and farmer participation was low. Market participation in sub-Saharan Africa has been assessed mainly based on already producing households without considering decision to produce by non-producers. In such cases, inferences from these studies may not be generalized to the entire population. Past efforts to evaluate viability of these community milk outlets has been done using gross margins which does not take into account time value of money. This study investigated dairy market participation, choice of milk sales outlets, viability of community milk cooling plants and existing coordination mechanisms supporting dairy producers. A Multi stage sampling technique was used to sample a total of 544 respondents. Descriptive statistics in combination with independent t test, Heckman’s two step model, binary logit model, Net Present Value technique and factor analysis were used to analyze objective one to five respectively. Results showed that households with higher household sizes, land acreage, education levels and headed by members of higher ages positively and significantly influenced dairy cows ownership. Equally access to credit and group membership positively influenced dairy cow ownership. However larger household sizes and prevailing milk market prices negatively influenced the quantity of milk sold. Milk sales conditional on dairy cow ownership suffered positive selectivity bias that resulted to a truncation effect of 92%. Whereas awareness of producers of the existence of community milk cooling plants had positive influence on choice of the milk cooling plants, open market milk prices and distance negatively influenced the choice of community milk cooling plants. Viability of the community cooling plants was highly sensitive to the consumer price, prices paid to producers and milk spoilage rates. It was observed that all community milk cooling plants with tank utilization levels of less than 20% suffered from non viability. Cronbach’s alpha test, revealed that coordination mechanisms or interventions categorized under support for training and support for input supply factors correlated consistently. In order to enhance milk marketing, all households should be profiled, pricing should be based on the grade of milk so as to attract more producers to join and supply regularly to boost utilization capacities. Improving the quality of roads should be done to reduce infrastructure induced transaction costs in the milk producing zones to enable them supply more milk.