Agricultural Livelihood Systems (ALS) typology of grain legumes and dry cereals – based smallholder farming systems in Western Burkina Faso

Abstract

Efficiently improving sub-Saharan smallholder farms’ livelihood requires targeted policy intervention accounting for their livelihood heterogeneity. The main objective of the present study was to empirically identifying agricultural livelihood systems in the sub-district of Satiri in western Burkina Faso with the aim of designing decision support tools for assessing productivities, resources use efficiency, and sustainability of GLDC-based smallholder systems in BURKINA FASO The methodological approached consisted in multivariate analyses combining PCA and K-CA. A total number of 445 farm-households were randomly sampled in five village of the sub-district and face-to-face interviews were conducted to collect multi-dimensional data. The analysis results showed that the main variables discriminating agricultural livelihoods in the study zone were found to be human (education and dependency), natural (land holdings and livestock), financial (annual gross income), physical (access to road and important market) social (Share of remittance income) assets, and production orientation (cotton and marketable food crops production). Three agricultural livelihood types were identified: Better-off, land rich, cotton-oriented and better road access; Middle-Income, diversified activities, and better road access; and Poor, landless and subsistence based, and low road access.