Social Capital, Perceived Benefits, Participation and Collective Marketing Performance of Smallholder Farmer Organizations in West Nile, Uganda.
| dc.contributor.author | Bakole Stephen | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-06-05T13:03:10Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-06-05T13:03:10Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025-05-01 | |
| dc.description | This is a master's thesis. | |
| dc.description.abstract | Collective marketing can improve the performance of smallholder farmers by enhancing their bargaining power, reducing transaction costs, and potentially leading to better prices and incomes (Noer, 2022). Despite reported cases of success from collective marketing activities like bulking, price negotiations, reduced transaction costs, there are a number of failures and weak performance observed among collective marketing organizations (CMOs), relating to unsatisfactory levels of participation of members in collective marketing activities (Okelai et al., 2020; Selhausen, 2016). A report by (UBOS, 2016), shows that nearly 65% of smallholder farmers continue to sell in informal markets and there is low level of cohesion among members of the CMOs. Okelai et al, (2020), attributed low profitability of joint enterprises of CMOs to causative factors like lack of effective external networks limiting the scope of market access for the diverse products, disloyalty and mistrust leading to side selling by members. Collective marketing organizations failure to pull produce in sufficient quantities to one marketing unit to achieve economies of scale is a major challenge due to weak relations among members. The study used a cross-sectional research methodology and a self-administered questionnaire to collect quantitative data for the study from 329 respondents. The study population consisted of 53 smallholder farmer organizations in West Nile as per the bulletin 2020/2021 from MAAIF. Krejcie & Morgan (1970) sample determination formular was used to determine the sample size of 47 smallholder farmer organizations. The study used Pearson correlation to establish the association between variables and the linear regression model to establish the predictive power of the independent variables’ social capital, perceived benefits and participation on the dependent variable (collective marketing performance of smallholder farmer organizations). The data was analyzed using SPSS Version 25. The findings of the study revealed that there is a positive significant relationship between social capital and collective marketing performance of collective marketing organizations. The results also showed a strong positive correlation between group marketing performance and perceived benefits. Additionally, the findings showed statistically significant positive correlation between involvement and collective marketing performance. The regression results showed that all the independent variables; social capital, perceived benefits and participation are significant predictors of collective marketing performance of smallholder farmer organizations in West Nile districts. Managers should use strategies that make members of CMOs to see and understand potential benefits from the organization to improve performance of CMOs. Members of CMOs should also cultivate social capital by observing norms and rules, networking, trusting on each other and trust leaders to improve performance of CMOs. Managers should motivate members of CMOs to remain in organization and attract new members so that quantity of produce bulked can attract large buyers, do price negotiations, access markets and increase business opportunities. This implies that when CMOs pay attention to sales growth rate, retain customers and bulk products, they sustain their organizations. Social capital, perceived benefits and participation are strong determinants of collective marketing performance of collective marketing organizations in West Nile, because the regression analysis showed a predictive power of 0.529 on the dependent variable. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Dr. Samuel Musigire (Makerere University Business School) & Mr. John Okelai (Makerere University Business School) | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Bakole, S. (2025) Social Capital, Perceived Benefits, Participation and Collective Marketing Performance of Smallholder Farmer Organizations in West Nile, Uganda. Makerere University Business School. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12282/5568 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Makerere University Business School | |
| dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ | |
| dc.title | Social Capital, Perceived Benefits, Participation and Collective Marketing Performance of Smallholder Farmer Organizations in West Nile, Uganda. | |
| dc.type | Thesis |