Are there options outside livestock economy? Diversification among households of northern Kenya

Pastoralism

Research, Policy and Practice

Table 4 Means of various socio-economic factors across livelihood strategies

	Livelihood strategy
Household characteristics	Pastoral	Agro-pastoral	Off-farm	p value
Age of household head	47.67	48.10	44.21	0.019
Years of formal schooling of the household head^a	.98	2.32	2.81	<0.001
Tropical livestock units^ab	9.06	2.06	3.46	<0.001
Durable index^a	1.62	2.40	2.13	<0.001
Diversity of income sources^a	1.12	1.83	1.56	<0.001
Hours taken to walk to water source^a	2.73	1.11	1.61	<0.001

^aSignificant at 99 % significant level. Durable index is a measure of asset endowment of a household. The assets considered were plough, bicycle, radio, TV and pack animals. For each of the assets owned by a household, a score of one was given and zero if the asset was absent. The durable index of a household was given by the summation of the asset scores
^b Tropical livestock units (TLUs). One TLU was taken as equivalent to an animal weighing 250 kg. The conversion factors used were 0.7, 0.1, 0.1 and 1.0 for cattle, goat, sheep and camel, respectively (Tache and Sjaastad 2010).