Socio-economic Determinants of Smallholder Coffee Farmers' Participation in Mount Meru Coffee Project in Arumeru District,Arusha,Tanzania.

While coffee agricultural projects are recognized as the engine of economic growth, most smallholder coffee farmers continue to resist participating in coffee projects in Arumeru District. The study was conducted to assess the determinants of smallholder coffee farmers’ participation in the Mount Meru Coffee Project. Specifically, the study aimed to assess the socio-economic determinants of smallholder coffee farmers’ participation in the Mount Meru Coffee Project. The study adopted a cross-sectional research design. An exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach was used, in which qualitative data were collected first, followed by quantitative data. A sample of 155 smallholder coffee farmers was selected using simple random sampling techniques. The qualitative data were analyzed using thematic content analysis with constant comparison. Quantitative data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), where descriptive statistics were computed to obtain frequencies and percentage distributions of the responses. Socio-economic characteristics of smallholder farmers were analyzed descriptively, while a binary logistic regression model was used to model smallholder coffee farmers’ participation in the Mount Meru Coffee Project. The study found that age, marital status, household size, household income, and land size significantly influenced household participation in the Mount Meru Coffee Project at the p