Abstract

The study examined urban women participation in vegetable gardening and specifically delved into assessing the socio-economic characteristics of women engaged in urban gardening, the level of participation of the women and social roles they played. Primary data for the study was gathered through the use of a wellstructured questionnaire administered on 140 female urban vegetable farmers to obtain relevant information on vegetable production in the study area. The data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics; mean, frequency counts, percentages while Spearman?s rank correlation was used to test the hypothesis. Major findings revealed that majority (67.2%) of the respondents were between the age ranges of 30-49 years with a mean of 41years, a lot of them were illiterates (42.1%) with average household size having a mean of 5. Majority (75.06%) earned below ?150,000.00 with a mean income of ?112,857.14 annually. Results also showed that urban women vegetable farmers frequently participate in harvesting (x? =2.94), followed by Marketing of produce (x? =2.89), raising seedlings (x? =2.74), weeding (x? =2.67). Years of experience (r=0.194) and income (r=0.264) positively correlated with participation in vegetable gardening activities. Women were advised to increase farm size and maintain their high participation so as to improve on their family welfare.

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