The Role of Farm Record‑keeping in Linking Agricultural Training to Agripreneurship Development: Evidence from Smallholder Farmers in Cameroon’s North‑West Region

Abstract

Agricultural transformation in developing countries increasingly depends on whether farmers develop entrepreneurial orientations alongside technical competencies. This study investigates whether farm record-keeping practices mediate the relationship between agricultural training and agripreneurship development among smallholder farmers in the North West region of Cameroon. Using a mediated hierarchical regression framework, data were collected from 442 farmers across seven administrative divisions through structured face-to-face interviews. Results confirm that agricultural training has a significant positive direct effect on agripreneurship development (formal training: β = .312, p < .001; informal training: β = .201, p < .001). Farm record-keeping also exerts a significant independent positive effect on agripreneurship (β = .289, p < .001). Critically, farm record-keeping partially mediates the training-agripreneurship relationship: the bootstrapped indirect effect is statistically significant (indirect effect = .096, 95% CI [.068, .127]), with the training coefficient declining from β = .387 to β = .201 upon introduction of the mediator. These findings demonstrate that agricultural training operates on entrepreneurial outcomes both directly and indirectly by cultivating systematic documentation habits that convert training-derived knowledge into farm-specific decision intelligence. The study extends Human Capital Theory, Resource-Based View theory, and Knowledge-Based View theory to smallholder agricultural settings and recommends that training programmes explicitly embed record-keeping instruction as a core entrepreneurship development component. Limitations include the cross-sectional design, which precludes causal inference, and the restriction of the sample to one administrative region of Cameroon, which limits generalisability to other agricultural contexts.