The participation of youths in agriculture in Kenya has been low leading to migration to urban areas where the youths expect to get better jobs in non-farm sector. They thus earn low incomes and experience increasing poverty, social and economic exclusion, and increased risk of political tensions. We carried out a study to identify the drivers of youth migration in densely populated areas of rural Kenya using panel data of 500 youths for the period 2007 to 2014 and an additional 115 sample cross sectional data of 2015 which was analyzed to describe he individual, household and community level variables using the probit model. The results established that 60 percent of youths migrated between 2007 and 2015 and about 40% of the migrants move out of the farms. The main drivers of migration from farming were gender, increasing age, population, production and village land rent. Migrating youths earned low incomes and had no incentives to rent land. Their production levels were low and had little asset based. To attract more youth to agriculture, requires a policy environment that promotes that development of land and labor markets in the rural areas, training on skills and increased investment for higher productivity.These will lead to increased access to land, education, gender, farm assets wages and productivity hampered migration. The study concluded that agriculture lack of an enabling investment environment drives the youths from agriculture. It is therefore recommended that, for farming to attract more youths and support the growth of the agricultural sector, policies should enable enhanced credit availability to catalyse access to production resources and increased productivity in the sector. These will stem out migration of youths from the rural areas address issues related to increased access to land, better education and increased returns on investment in the agriculture sector.
