Determinants of smallholders’ adoption of mobile phones for vegetable marketing in Vietnam

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors that shape the adoption of mobile phones for vegetable marketing by Vietnamese smallholders.

Design/methodology/approach

A structured questionnaire was given to 185 smallholders randomly chosen from 345 vegetable smallholders in the Vinh Thanh district of Vietnam. Descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and a binary logistic regression were applied to analyse the data.

Findings

The research results show that the smallholders’ adoption of mobile phones for vegetable marketing is significantly affected by their number of extension contacts, distance from smallholders’ homes to local markets, community-based organisation participation, gender, training/credit programme participation, age, education level, income and farm size (χ² = 143,111, p < 0.000).

Practical implications

A combination of factors related to socio-economic, situational and institutional characteristics of smallholders should be considered when promoting smallholders’ uptake of mobile phones for vegetable marketing in developing nations.

Originality/value

This research provides useful insights into the determinants of mobile phone adoption for vegetable marketing by smallholders and highlights areas that need to be considered when designing policies to improve the uptake of information and communication technologies in developing countries.

Citation

Hoang, H.G. and Nguyen, D.V. (2023), "Determinants of smallholders’ adoption of mobile phones for vegetable marketing in Vietnam", Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. 72 No. 4/5, pp. 506-522. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-07-2021-0112