We examine smallholder participation in horticultural markets in Zambia, with two main questions
in mind: 1) who participates in horticultural markets? and 2) how does participation affect household
income and other welfare outcomes? To control for self-selection bias in the estimation of impacts,
we used an endogenous switching framework on nationwide representative data over two agricultural
seasons pooled, but controlling for district-level fixed effects. We found that participation is
associated with labour availability, farm size, lagged productive assets, social capital through blood
kinship links to the chief or headman, level of community participation in the government’s input
subsidy programme, and high rainfall variability measured by its coefficient of variation.
Participation significantly increased income by 285% overall, increasing to over 300% for femaleheaded
households, those cultivating less than one hectare and the extremely poor. These findings
provide an empirical foundation to support Zambian policy-makers’ crop-diversification and
poverty-reduction agricultural policy objectives.