Adoption of Small‐Scale Irrigation and Its Livelihood Impacts in Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

The potential of smallholder-irrigated agriculture to enhance food security and improve livelihoods has led the government of Ethiopia to invest significantly in irrigation establishment. This article aims to investigate the impact of small-scale irrigation on households' livelihood. To deal with the problems of purposive targeting and self-selection which are likely to occur for this type of intervention, we use a sophisticated econometric technique called 'propensity score matching' to study this impact. Our findings confirm the presence of a statistically significant difference in income, overall expenditure, asset accumulation and expenditures on agricultural inputs between the treated and control households. In contrast, no statistically significant differences in livestock resources, food consumption, and expenditure on education and health were found. Furthermore, the proportion of poor is respectively 20 and 30% for the treated and control households. So, overall it can be concluded that participation in the small-scale irrigation has robust and positive effect on most of the livelihood indices and that an expansion of irrigation schemes is a good strategy in the water-stressed and drought-prone areas of Ethiopia. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. RÉSUMÉLe potentiel de l'agriculture irriguée à améliorer la sécurité alimentaire et améliorer les moyens de subsistance des petits exploitants a conduit le gouvernement éthiopien à investir de manière significative dans l'établissement d'irrigation. Cet article vise à étudier l'impact de l'irrigation à petite échelle sur les moyens de subsistance des ménages. Pour faire face aux problèmes de ciblage téléologique et d'auto-sélection qui sont susceptibles de se produire pour ce type d'interventions, nous utilisons une technique économétrique sophistiqué appelée score de propension pour étudier cet impact. Nos résultats confirment la présence d'une différence statistiquement significative dans le revenu, les dépenses globales, l'accumulation d'actifs et des dépenses sur les intrants agricoles entre les ménages traités et de contrôle. Nous n'avons par contre pas trouvé de différence sur ressources en cheptel, la consommation alimentaire et les dépenses d'éducation et de santé. En outre, la proportion de pauvres est respectivement 20 et 30% pour les ménages traités et de contrôle. Donc, dans l'ensemble, on peut conclure que la participation à l'irrigation à petite échelle a un effet robuste et positif sur la plupart des indices de subsistance et que l'expansion des systèmes d'irrigation est une bonne stratégie pour gérer les stress hydrique et la sécheresse régions d'Ethiopie.

The Impact of Using Small-Scale Irrigation Motor Pumps on Farmers’ Household Incomes in Ethiopia: A Quasi-Experimental Approach

“…Nonetheless, because of the favorable environmental conditions in the study area, using irrigation is expected to increase work opportunities and production throughout the year. Therefore, access to irrigation promotes land-, labor-, and capital-intensive agriculture that boosts the quantity of production over a year [8,28].…”

“…However, an individual cannot be in two states (user and non-user) during the survey. Therefore, from the non-users, we constructed a comparison group using PSM, that is, the probability of being in the SSIMP user group, to estimate the average treatment effect (ATE) of using SSIMP [25][26][27][28]. Since SSIMPs are distributed by the office of agriculture in a district, we did not conduct a baseline survey for each farmer to measure the initial differences across treatment and control groups.…”

Assessing Production Efficiency by Farm Size in Rwanda: A Zero-inefficiency Stochastic Frontier Approach

“…Information on the socioeconomic characteristics of the households and on institutional and farmspecific characteristics was also collected. Note: TLUs across various categories of livestock are computed as follows: 0.7 for cows; 0.45 for heifers; 0.1 for goats; 0.1 for sheep; 0.01 for chicken; and 0.2 for pigs (Zeweld et al 2015).…”

Combining Econometric, Cost–Benefit, and Financial Methodologies in a Framework to Increase Diffusion and to Predict the Feasibility and Sustainability of Irrigation Schemes: A Case Study in Kurdistan, Iraq

“…The irrigation project is more likely to be adopted (joined) by: poorer farmers (unlike in [12,16,17,19]), who rely more on agriculture than those who rely on livestock activities (like in [15,25]); farmers who have been informed or trained by governmental agencies (like in [14,18,24]), and who feel that they can obtain fair prices for outputs (like in [13]); literate farmers (like in [12,17]); farmers with positive expectations about the future; farmers who base their decisions on a maximization approach rather than on a habit approach. On the other hand, the irrigation project is less likely to be joined by farmers who feel that they obtain fair prices for inputs (like in [13,14]), who have direct access to product markets, and who have satisfactory access to the private credit (loans) market (similar to [12]).…”

“…Technological interventions ( [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]), in general, and irrigation projects ( [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]), in particular, often result in a low level of awareness among the target group and in a low level of successful diffusion of the project (i.e., dissemination of knowledge leading to participation) because farmers are rarely consulted a priori about their specific circumstances, priority problems, and expectations. a duration model in the U.S. to estimate the long-term trends in the adoption and diffusion of technologies designed to reduce environmental externalities from agriculture.…”