The Role of Farm Record‑keeping in Linking Agricultural Training to Agripreneurship Development: Evidence from Smallholder Farmers in Cameroon’s North‑West Region

Abe Gilbert Ntoh *

Department of Agribusiness Technology, University of Bamenda, College of Technology, Cameroon.

Bime Egwu, Mary-Juliet

Department of Agribusiness Technology, University of Bamenda, College of Technology, Cameroon.

Balgah Roland Azibo

Department of Agribusiness Technology, University of Bamenda, College of Technology, Cameroon.

*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.


Abstract

Agricultural transformation in developing countries increasingly depends on whether farmers develop entrepreneurial orientations alongside technical competencies. This study investigates whether farm record-keeping practices mediate the relationship between agricultural training and agripreneurship development among smallholder farmers in the North West region of Cameroon. Using a mediated hierarchical regression framework, data were collected from 442 farmers across seven administrative divisions through structured face-to-face interviews. Results confirm that agricultural training has a significant positive direct effect on agripreneurship development (formal training: β = .312, p < .001; informal training: β = .201, p < .001). Farm record-keeping also exerts a significant independent positive effect on agripreneurship (β = .289, p < .001). Critically, farm record-keeping partially mediates the training-agripreneurship relationship: the bootstrapped indirect effect is statistically significant (indirect effect = .096, 95% CI [.068, .127]), with the training coefficient declining from β = .387 to β = .201 upon introduction of the mediator. These findings demonstrate that agricultural training operates on entrepreneurial outcomes both directly and indirectly by cultivating systematic documentation habits that convert training-derived knowledge into farm-specific decision intelligence. The study extends Human Capital Theory, Resource-Based View theory, and Knowledge-Based View theory to smallholder agricultural settings and recommends that training programmes explicitly embed record-keeping instruction as a core entrepreneurship development component. Limitations include the cross-sectional design, which precludes causal inference, and the restriction of the sample to one administrative region of Cameroon, which limits generalisability to other agricultural contexts.

Keywords: Agripreneurship, agricultural training, farm record-keeping, mediation analysis, mediation model, entrepreneurial behavior, smallholder farmers


How to Cite

Ntoh, Abe Gilbert, Bime Egwu, Mary-Juliet, and Balgah Roland Azibo. 2026. “The Role of Farm Record‑keeping in Linking Agricultural Training to Agripreneurship Development: Evidence from Smallholder Farmers in Cameroon’s North‑West Region”. Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension, Economics & Sociology 44 (4):212-24. https://doi.org/10.9734/ajaees/2026/v44i42924.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.