Determinants of Small Scale Irrigation Participation Decision and Its Impact on Household Food Security in Lume District Oromia Region
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2022-06
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Small-scale irrigation is one of the most promising approaches to enhance smallholder farmers’ livelihood enabling to produce twice or more per year. However, there are still farmers who are not participating irrigation, and depend on rain fed agriculture even if there is the access for irrigation in the area. The study area, Lume district, is one of the potential districts for irrigation having more than 4120 hectares of land suitable for irrigation. Despite the potential, farmers in the district are not participating in irrigation to the expected level. This study was intended with the main objectives of assessing factors affecting smallholder farmers’ participation in irrigation, and the impacts of small-scale irrigation on farm households’ food security. Both primary and secondary data were used. The primary data were collected from 112 non participants, and 77 participant households were selected using simple random sampling. Inferential and econometric data analysis methods were employed. Demographic, institutional, and socio-economic factors were summarized using Inferential statistics, and to identify determinants of decision of households to participate in irrigation logistic regression model was used and based on the result, age of the head, family size, livestock holding, crop failure, land rent out, extension contact, and credit access significantly affected household decision to participate in small scale irrigation. From the result of propensity score matching method, family members of participant households have more food consumption score of 3.5 compared to family members of non-participants, and this difference is statistically significant. The sensitivity analysis proved that the estimated average treatment effect on the treated was insensitive to unobserved bias. Therefore, the estimated ATT is the pure impact of participation in irrigation. Based on this result, policy interventions related with improving the hindering factors that affecting irrigation participation decision are recommended which intern improves households’ food security.
Description
Keywords
Impact, Small-scale irrigation, Food security, Lume district, PSM