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

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.