Factors Affect Participation of Rural Households? Off-farm Activities in Tigray National Regional State

In Ethiopia agriculture is a main stay of the economy. However, agriculture is still largely traditional and subsistence type. Therefore, agriculture alone cannot provide sufficient livelihood opportunities to achieve food security. There are other methods to cope up the problem of food security like, rural off-farm employment. Thus the main objective of paper is to analyze the determinants of rural household off-farm participation in Tigray national regional state to increase farm production. To achieve this objective cross sectional data was collected from 393 sample households. The method of data analysis was carried out in this study comprises both descriptive and econometric analysis. The econometrics model result indicated, out of the 12 factors included in the model 9 variables were found to have a significant influence on the probability of off-farm participate at less than 10 percent level of significance. The survey also found that about 17.34 percent, 7.97 percent, 16.92 percent, 19.58 percent and 7.83 percent, of the respondents faced problems of lack of available materials, lack of experience, busy with agricultural activities, lack of capital and lack of available land, respectively.