This paper examines the determinants of participation in non-farm activities in rural areas of Bangladesh using cross sectional data collected from twelve villages of three districts of Bangladesh. Both descriptive statistics and an econometric model are employed to analyze the data. Multinomial Logitic model is used to find out the determinants of participation in non-farm activities. In this regard, there have been collected 400 data from the study area. It has been found that 304 respondents are engaged in non-farm activities while 96 respondents are engaged in farm activities following the multistage sampling procedure. The descriptive statistics result shows the average value of the socio-economic characteristics, mean differences of the socio-economic characteristics between non-farm and farm households etc. The multinomial Logistic model, which is developed based on household income, indicates that ‘household size’, ‘access to credit’ ‘receiving training’ and ‘improved infrastructural facilities’ have positive and significant influence on the probability of participation in non-farm activities. On the other hand, ‘age of household head’, ‘land holding size’ ‘distance to market’ and ‘farm income’ have negative and significant impact on the probability of participation in non-farm activities. These results have important implications for policy, economic growth and development.

Keywords: Rural people, Farm and non-farm activities, Participation decision, Bangladesh