Market Oriented or Not: A Gender Situation Analyses of Small Holder Sweet potato Farmers in South East Nigeria

Farmers can only be market oriented if his/her production plan follows market signals and produce commodities that is more marketable. In other to achieve this, this study provided empirical evidence on the gender analyses of market orientation in South East, Nigeria. A stratified sampling design was used to select 360 sample respondents in 2017. Market Orientation Index (MOI) and Heckit selectivity model were used to estimate the level of market orientation and determinants of market orientation respectively. The results show a mean market orientation score (0.17 and 0.59) for the male and female sweet potato farmers respectively, indicating low level of market orientation especially for the male farmers. The coefficients for age, educational level, capital, area cultivated with sweet potato, farming experience, marketing experience, native of community, and road conditions were positive and household size negative and significantly related to market orientation for female farmers. Coefficients for age, household size, level of education, transportation cost, native of community, and marketing experience were positive and distance from farm to the market was negative and significantly related with market orientation for the male farmers. The coefficients for gender were negative and significant at 5% and 1% for probability of being market oriented and level of market orientation respectively, indicating that the female farmers were more likely to be market oriented compared to their male counterparts. The study therefore calls for policies on promoting farmers access to land (particularly the female farmers), availability and the use of quality planting seed and establishment of formal sweet potato market.