# Introduction n Nigeria today, the mantra "beyond oil" has become a 'buzz word' owing to dwindling revenue from oil and its attendant adverse effect on the economy and citizens' welfare. Governments have acknowledged the impact of Agribusiness Small and Micro agro-Enterprises (SMEs) on job creation, improvement of people's standards of living and hence an overall impact on the economy and thus encouraging entrepreneurship in the sector as a way of diversifying the economic reliance on oil for development. The term entrepreneurship is used to describe dynamic process of creating incremental wealth (Shailesh et al., 2013). This wealth is created by individuals who take the major risks in terms of equity, time and carrier commitment of providing value to some product or services. The product or service itself may or may not be new or unique but value must somehow be infused by the entrepreneur by securing and allocating the necessary skill and resources. In other words entrepreneurship is the application of energy for initiating and building an enterprise (Mishra et al., 2010). Development of agricultural entrepreneurship has been an important policy to increase the value of agricultural production and open up the sector for businesses which is clear departure from what obtained in the past when oil prices were at their peak. Therefore, a policy change of this nature requires the development of entrepreneurial and organizational competency in farmers. Developing entrepreneurial skills of farmers can take two approaches. The first is to amend the social, economic, political, and cultural frameworks that hinders, and foster those that stimulate their development. The second is encouragement of farmers, via their personalities and capabilities, to kindle the development of entrepreneurship. If agro-enterprise competitiveness is to be improved by nurturing entrepreneurial behaviour, both approaches have to be considered. Agribusiness or agro-enterprise is a sector in which most of the rural SMEs operate in and includes all participants in a commodity vertical structure, from suppliers, farmers, assemblers, processors and distributors to ultimate domestic and international consumers. The agribusiness SMEs are of importance to the Nigerian economy because they enhance economic growth, help accelerate development and are a business solution to rural poverty. In view of the dwindling government revenue from crude oil it is a delight to know that government has realised that the two concepts, entrepreneurship and agribusiness are not mutually exclusive and have extended supports for their promotion. In Lagos State, though government, private and non-governmental development programmes are put in place to promote entrepreneurship, most agribusinesses are still encountering challenges that stagnates entrepreneurial activities. The challenge in the study area lies in assessing the level of entrepreneurial drives, and key factors that would constitute a framework which can be used as a basis for building a platform in which entrepreneurial initiatives can thrive. In Lagos State, agribusiness owners/managers' socio-economic characteristic, extent of entrepreneurship drive in agribusiness enterprise, extent of intent to be involved in agricultural production and factors that influence entrepreneurship in agribusiness enterprise are not well documented. Constraints to entrepreneurship development drive in agribusiness enterprise are also not known. In literature, Bommes and Kolb (2004) examined Economic Factors Affecting Entrepreneurship at two levels of structural and personal positions. In their study, structural position implies barriers and opportunities, and personal position depicts potentials and limitations. Structural positions include goods and services, access to credit and loans, competitive market and tax rates. Personal positions cover skilled and trained staffs, human capital and income level. Jancikova (2004) The sample units of analysis were the small and micro agribusiness firm owners/managers. Because they are strewn across major markets such as Agege, Sangross in Lagos Island and Sabo in Ikorodu, the representativeness of the sample were of great significance so that the results can be inferential throughout the population. Thus, 40 agribusinesses were purposively selected in each of the Markets. The study employed a semi structured interviews which allows the use of questionnaires. The questionnaire elicited information on socio-economic characteristics of the farmers, perception of entrepreneur on factors which affect agribusiness namely social, psychological, economic, managerial, marketing, training and cultural factors in a likert-type structure. Altogether, 120 questionnaires were administered, collated and used for the analyses. Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentages, mean and standard deviation were used to summarise the data while multiple regression analysis was used to determine socio-economic factors affecting agribusiness entrepreneurship development. The regression model is expressed as follows: Y = ? 0 + ? 1 X 1 + ? 2 X 2 + ? 3 X 3 + ? 4 X 4 +? 5 X 5 + ? 6 X 6 + ? 7 X 7 +? 8 X 8 + ? 9 X 9 + e i(1) III. # Results and Discussions a) Socio-economic Characteristics of Respondents The socio-economic characteristics of small and micro agribusiness owners/managers are presented in Table 1. The Table shows that majority (about 94%) of the respondents were 50 years and below while only 5% were above 50 years. The mean age was 42.1. The Table further showed that about27% only attained a primary level educational qualification while more than half of the respondents, that is 56.7%, attained a secondary education qualification. About 7% of managers/owners have a tertiary qualification. The findings signified that the farmers have adequate educational background that is relevant for adoption of innovations and skills in entrepreneurship development. It is expected that the higher level of education will contribute significantly to decision making of a owners/managers of agribusiness for entrepreneurship development. Male agribusiness owners/managers were more (73.3%) than female (26.7), buttressing the usual male dominance in the world of business. Their marital status showed that more than three-quarters (71.67%) were married; about 23.00% were single while 5.00% were widowed. Previous experience of an owner/manager is undoubtedly invaluable to the present business. Anowner/manager with managerial and entrepreneurship experience is likely to have the necessary skills for the demands of the present business venture. 51.16% of the aggregate sample has between 11 and 19 years while 23.3% possessed more than 20 years in business experience. Owner/managers with less than 10 years of experience and entrepreneurship experience are only 25.00%. The mean business experience was 14.20. The distribution of agribusiness entrepreneur according to their household size shows that majority (53.33%) of the owners/managers had household size of 6-10 persons while about 46.67%had household size of 1-5 persons. The mean household size was 5 persons. This implies that farmers in the study area have a large household size. Large household size ensures availability of family labour to address labour challenges. The Table also revealed that majority (85.00%) of the agribusiness owners/managers are member of cooperative while about 15.00% of the farmers do not belong to cooperative society. This is expected to facilitate knowledge sharing and ease of fund access and thus enhanced development of entrepreneurship. The table further revealed that the average annual farm income of majority (53.33%) of the farmers lies between N501,000 -1,500,000, about 26.67% had an average income between N251,001-500,000, approximately 15.00% had an average of N100,000-250,000 while about 3.33% and 1.67%have an average income of less than N100,000 and greater than ?1,500,000 respectively. The mean monthly farm income was ?84,833.00. The result implied that respondents are fairly high income earners in spite of large family size they supported. Business size distribution of the owners and managers of agribusiness is also shown in Table 1. It indicates that larger proportion (68.33%) of the owners/managers had a business size of between 1.0 and 2.0 million naira worth; about 23.33% had a business size of less than1.0 million naira worth, while approximately 8.33% had business size of greater than 2.5 million naira worth. The mean business size was 1.61 million naira worth. It can also be observed from Table 1 that 63% of there spondents are business person, 18% are civil servants, 20% are farmers and 9% are tailors. The result revealed that, most of the respondents (63%) were business person and deemed agribusiness as their primary occupation. Table 1 also depicts the distribution of the secondary occupation of the respondents. Result from the table, revealed that, 28% of the respondents are mechanics, 28% are farmers, 24% are civil servants and 20% are welders. This implies that, most of the respondents are into farming (28%) and mechanic (28%) respectively. They are into secondary occupation to supplement their income from agribusiness enterprise. # b) Forms and Motivation of Business From Table 2, most agribusiness entrepreneur runs their businesses as sole traders which constitute 85%. There maining 15% run businesses as a partnership. Table 3 shows that most agribusiness entrepreneur (56.25%),were motivated to start their own agribusinesses because they could not find work, followed by those motivated by quest for independence associated with running own business (21.25%). Only about 13% and 9% reported financial reasons and selfemployment respectively as drive or motivation for entrepreneurship in agribusiness. As table 4 shows, the most important item perceived as solution among several items of economic factor is stabilization of prices of agricultural products (mean=4.61). Price stabilization has been an important policy strategy in agriculture and must be sustained especially in the face of price volatility of agricultural products in recent times. Among social factor items, tendency to group work ranked highest (mean=4.18). This is in tandem with their membership in cooperative society as membership of cooperative society promotes the tendency to group work. Fair sharing of benefit among employees (mean=4.71) rank highest among managerial items as the most important for development of agribusiness entrepreneurship in Lagos State. Perceived inequality in enjoyment of benefits among employees of agribusiness can affect their job performance and ultimately agro-enterprise development. With respect to marketing factor, familiarity with national and regional market rank highest (Mean=4.68) while Empowerment through training programs to improve agribusiness entrepreneurship (mean=4.43) is the most important training item according to the owner/manager of agribusiness enterprises. # Enthusiasm to achieve great things (Mean=4.35) and having supportive family with positive view about owning or entrepreneurship in agribusiness (Mean=4.43) are important items considered by agribusiness entrepreneurs for entrepreneurship development under psychological and cultural factors respectively. In table 5, the mean values of items for each of the 7 factors were pooled to ascertain which of them was deemed as priority for agribusiness entrepreneurship development in Lagos State. The implication of the finding is that increase in the above items would automatically increase owners/managers entrepreneurial drive in agribusiness in the study area. # d) Regression Analysis of Socio-economic factors affecting Development of Agribusiness The factors affecting the development of entrepreneurship in agribusiness enterprises were estimated using equation (1). The results of the estimated regression analysis are presented in Table 6. The coefficient of determination (R 2 ) as adjusted gives the value of 0.78 (Table 6) implying that 78% of the variation in level of involvement in agribusiness entrepreneurship is explained by the independent variable. As shown in Table 6, the performance of individual variables included in the regression indicate that Secondary occupation, Educational qualification and Membership of Cooperative do not significantly influence the development of entrepreneurial activities in agribusiness enterprises in the study area. Majority of the owners/managers of agribusiness in the study area completed secondary level of education while very few had university education. The level of education perhaps has no bearing on agribusiness development as years of experience or on the job education could suitably substitutes for classroom education. Membership of cooperative which is expected to facilitate sharing of experiences and access to cheap credit is surprisingly not significantly associated with level of involvement in agribusiness. No explanation could suffice. The coefficient of secondary occupation -0.029 lean towards agribusiness enterprise and confirming that majority of the owners/managers do not have viable secondary occupation, and perhaps with increase in educational qualification most owners of agribusiness may consider other options of livelihood, thus, the result is not surprising. The parameter estimates of the remaining six of the nine variables turned out to be the main factors influencing the involvement of owners/managers in the development of agribusiness entrepreneurship. They are Age, Gender, Marital status, estimated business size, Family size and Primary occupation. Age, gender, marital status and estimated business size have positive relationship with level of involvement in agribusiness enterprise while Family size and Primary occupation have negative relationship. These results implied that an increase in age, gender, marital status and estimated business size would lead to an increase in level of involvement in agribusiness entrepreneurship. Positive significance of age suggest that the older the owners/managers of agribusiness the more they are involved in entrepreneurial activities in agribusiness. This however, does not conform with the previous studies which show a negative relationship (Rafael, et al, 1999, Olomola, 2000).The coefficient of gender (?=35643.18) is > 0, indicating that male entrepreneur are more involved in development of agribusiness enterprises than female. Positive significance of marital status shows that marriage helps involvement in the development of agribusiness. This is so because, majority of owners/ managers interviewed were married. As expected, estimated business size is positive and significant depicting that the bigger the business size, the more involved in agribusiness development an entrepreneur would be. Actually the bigger the business size the better the capacity to yield incentives for reinvestment, diversification and willingness on the part of entrepreneurs to initiate development efforts within the sector of his business operation. Negative correlation of Family size and Primary occupation indicates that increase in these variables would lead to decrease in level of involvement in the development of agribusiness entrepreneurial activities in the study area. Although, large household size has been attributed to availability of family labour for farm work, but, here it seems, it portends resource depletion. Resources that should have been available for entrepreneurship development would be diverted to large family upkeep. # IV. # Conclusion and Recommendations This paper primarily sought to determine the factors affecting the entrepreneurship development in small and micro agribusiness firms. Primary data from 120 owners/managers of Small and Micro Agribusiness Enterprises purposively selected for the study were analysed using descriptive statistics and multiple regression models. Results showed that majority of the owners/ managers of agribusiness were male (73.3%), married (71.6%), belong to cooperative society (85%), have business size of between 1 and 2 million naira worth (68.33%) with mean family size and monthly income of 5.0 and ?84,833.00 respectively. Results also showed that majority (56.7%) had secondary education and were motivated to start agribusiness (56.2%) because they could not find job. The findings of this study further showed that using appropriate official knowledge along with local knowledge, extreme enthusiasm to do or achieve great works, using modern educational methods, knowledge of national and regional markets, fair sharing of benefit among workers, tendency to group work, price stabilization of agriculture products and having supportive family with positive view to owning agribusiness enterprises, are the most important factors items affecting the development of entrepreneurship in agribusiness in the study area. Similarly, economic factor followed by social and cultural factors ranked highest among other factors considered important for the development of agribusiness entrepreneurship. Parameter estimates from multiple regression showed that age, gender, marital status and estimated business size have positive correlation with level of involvement in agribusiness enterprise while Family size and Primary occupation have negative correlations. Secondary occupation, membership of Cooperative and educational attainment were not significantly related with level of involvement in agribusiness enterprise development. In light of the contributions and importance of the agribusiness small and micro enterprises in the economic development, it becomes imperative to identify the key factors that are affecting the development of agro-enterprises in Lagos State. Though, certain attempts have been made in the past to alienate some of these factors in Nigeria albeit in other states. Against this backdrop, the following recommendations are made towards the development of agribusiness entrepreneurship in Lagos State: ? Effective and adequate entrepreneurship policies such as price stabilization policy and programmes on agribusiness should be developedwhile addressing factors that hinder its growth and development as a way of actualising the current transformation agenda and "beyond oil" mantra of the present government of on poverty eradication and development. ? Fostering entrepreneurship education at all levels to ensure capacity building for diverse enterprises in agriculture is also advocated. ? Agribusiness owner should be motivated by making access to Loan facility easy to ensure increase in the size of their business as bigger business size will increase involvement in agribusiness development. 1Age (years)FrequencyPercentage (%)Mean/AverageLess than 403831.6741-507663.3351-6065.00Total120100.0042.11GenderMale8673.33Female3426.66Total120100.0Educational Level (Years)Non formal education1210.00Primary3226.67Secondary6856.67Tertiary86.67Total120100.010.27Marital StatusMarried8671.67Single2823.33Widowed65.00Total120100.0Business Experience (Years)Less than 103025.0011-196251.6720 and above2823.33Total120100.014.20Household Size (Number of Persons)1-56453.33 2Forms of business FrequencyPercentageSole trader10285Partnership1815Close corporation 00Total120100 3ReasonFrequencyPercentageFinancial reasons16.513.75Could not find work67.256.25Independence25.521.25Self-employment10.58.75Total120100c) Factors affecting Development of Entrepreneurshipin Agribusiness EnterprisesThe researchers explored several factorssuch as economic, social, managerial, marketing, 4S/NoIndicatorVariableMeanStandardDeviation1Economic Factor(a)Stabilization of agricultural products4.610.75prices(b)satisfaction from income4.320.81(c) access to information and Economic4.010.82and marketing Statistics(d) Adequate investment in agribusiness4.180.92(e) appropriate infrastructure and support3.730.82to export agricultural products2Social Factor(a) Tendency to group work4.180.92(b) Providing insurance for entrepreneurs3.730.82(c) good rapport with partners/colleagues3.510.86(e) Adequate Bankruptcy Laws3.640.983Managerial Factor(a) Fair sharing of benefits among4.710.71employees(b) Appreciate and encouragement of4.280.90employees(c) Ability to provide leadership by3.810.86agribusiness manager(d) Failure and fault tolerance in the field of3.410.86innovation(e) Using Staffs' ideas and suggestions in3.51.08decision-making4Marketing Factor(a)Effective advertising to attract new4.620.57customers(b)direct sales of products without4.620.65intermediaries(c)Familiarity with national and regional4.680.78markets(d)Familiarity with local markets3.51.325Training(a)Using Modern methods of training4.320.78(b)Empowermentthroughtraining4.430.91programstoimproveagribusinessentrepreneurship(c) Access to computers and Internet4.350.95(d) short-term skill development classes4.360.98(e) Building and strengthening Consultancy4.310.966Psychological Factor (a) Enthusiasm to achieve great things4.350.97(b) High self-Confidence and self-reliance4.310.97(c) High tendency to self-employment3.410.86(d) High incentive to finding new sources3.601.09(e) Apply personal creativity3.501.087Cultural Factor(a) Combining formal knowledge with4.230.69indigenous knowledge(b) Supportive family with a positive view to4.430.72agribusiness entrepreneurship(c) Supportive friends and relatives3.790.77(d) Possessing team work spirit3.760.98 5RankFactorsMeanSD1Economic factor4.560.692Social factor4.230.653Cultural factor4.010.704Managerial factor3.790.725Marketing factor3.560.746Training factor3.730.807Psychological factor3.630.80Economic factor (Mean=4.56) ranked bestamong other factors, followed by social factor (4.23) andcultural factor (4.01) in that order. Efforts at developingagribusiness enterprise in Lagos State should puteconomic factor before all other factors. 6VariablesCoefficientStandard ErrorT-valueAge72104.8929675.942.43**Gender35643.184589.1227.77***Marital status4356.672438.111.79*Estimated business size5.8852832.6184642.25**Family size-0.0160.27904-17.44*Primary occupation-3.333-1.35-2.47**Secondary occupation-0.0290.68991-0.042Educational qualification0.0010.000180.18Membership Coop-0.230510.20136-1.14Constant0.0790.158792.01**R 20.783Adjusted R20.765F-Statistics78.6***= 1% significant, **5% significant, *10% significant Where, Y = Level of involvement in agribusiness (proxied by number of years involved in agribusiness enterprises),? 0 =Intercept X 1 = Age (Years), X 2 = Gender (1 if male; 0 if female),X 3 = Marital status (married 1; Not married 0), X 4 = Estimated business size (?), X 5 = Family size (No. in family), X 6 = Primary occupation (1 if agribusiness, 0 otherwise) X 7 = Secondary occupation (1 if other trade, 0 agribusiness), and X 8 = Educational qualification (Proxied by numbers of years informal school). © 2015 Global Journals Inc. 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