Market Access through One Million Regressions:
What do Ugandan Dairy Farmers Say?
Ugo Pica-Ciamarra & Nadhem Mtimet
Conference on Policies for Competitive Smallholder Livestock Production
Gaborone, Botswana, 4-6 March 2015

How it starts
• Call from Ugo and a possible future collaboration on the Phase II of the
project “Livestock in Africa: Improving data for better policies”
• Phase I (2010-2014): Improvement of agricultural statistical system,
with a focus on livestock
• Phase II (2014-2016): Data analysis for improving livestock sector
policies / strategies
• 3 countries: Niger, Tanzania and Uganda collaborating with Ministries
of Livestock / sattistical authorities
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And then…
• We discussed what’s about identifying the variables/factors which affect
Ugandan milk producers’ market orientation/access?
• The survey included a question whether the producer consider him self
as “subsistent” or “commercial/ market oriented”
• And from there we decided to review the existent literature on the
determinants of market access for milk/dairy producers in developing
countries
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And we found…
• Around 49 indicators/variables on market access/orientation which
includes:
 Household (HH) characteristics: size, ethnicity, age of HH head,
education of HH head, gender of HH head, etc.
 Livestock assets: number of indigenous cows, number of cross-
breed cows, oxen owned, buffalo TLU, small ruminants owned, etc.
 Other HH assets: land holding, per-capita land, leases land, tin-roof
house, etc.
 HH income: crop income, HH income, non-farm income, etc.
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And we found…
 Production/consumption/marketing practices: milk produced,
proportion of milk sold, proportion of milk consumed, milk yield, milk
price, milk test, zero grazing system, permanent labour, frequencies
of sale, transport fees, etc.
 Other HH characteristics: membership in coop, access to credit,
government extension agents visits, connection to electricity,
availability of communication equipment, etc.
 Community-level characteristics: distance to selling point, distance to
main town, distance to tarmac road, presence of NGO in village,
coop/farmer group in village, processing facilities in village, milk
collection centre in village, private trader in village, etc. 5

So we used the data…
• Data from the Uganda 2011/12 National Panel Survey (NPS)
• 2,716 HH => focusing on the agricultural survey and more specifically
on milk producers we obtain 622 HH: 548 subsistent and 74 commercial
• 83% hold indigenous cows and 17% cross-breed cows
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And here are some results…
Variables/indicators Subsistent group
(n=312)
Commercial group
(n=59)
Difference
Number of cows owned 2.8 6.5 P<0.01
Access to extension
services (% yes)
33% 34% Non significant
Milk production per cow
(litre/day)
3.45 5.62 P<0.01
Quantities of milk sold
(litre/year)
518 1733 P<0.01
Income from milk sold 195 3,230 P<0.05
($/year)
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But surprisingly…
• We found that from the group of 59 auto-declared commercial milk
producers, 27 HH (46%) have not sold milk during the last 12 months!
• We probably need to use now another criteria for instance the proportion
of milk sold and segment the sample into 2 groups: subsistent and
commercial…
• We will use percentiles or quartiles of proportions of milk sold to decide
on producers’ segmentation. For instance we have 217 producers (58%)
who have not sold milk in the last 12 months and 71% sold less than
15% of their production.
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Contacts:
Nadhem Mtimet: n.mtimet@cgiar.org
Ugo Pica-Ciamarra: Ugo.PicaCiamarra@fao.org
International Livestock Research Institute www.ilri.org
Thanks
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