The Impact of Small Scale Irrigation on Household Income in Bambasi Woreda, Benishangul-Gumuz Region, Ethiopia (original) (raw)

Small scale irrigation is one of the most useful irrigation systems designed to increase production and productivity and reduces risk related with rainfall variability and increasing income of rural farm households indeed. In fact, planners, researchers, development practitioners, and donors emphasized the importance of small sale irrigation in their policy recommendations and actual measures. So, the main objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of small scale irrigation on the income of rural households in Bambasi Woreda. This paper used a cross-sectional household level survey data and multistage sampling was employed to select the four kebeles from Bambasi woreda and the information obtained from a total sample of 363 randomly selected households of these total sample households 117 households are treated group whereas, 246 households are control group. Secondary data were also collected from different sources. As part of the study, the data collected were analyzed through propensity score matching. Besides, the estimates of the propensity score matching of the probit model exhibits that gender, the linear and non-linear age, education, plot size, social position participation, extension service, access to credit and total livestock unit are the statistically significant variables which significantly affects the income of small scale irrigation. And the region of common support is found between 0.0017 and 0.999. Furthermore, the nearest neighbor, radius, kernel and stratification matching methods of the outcome variable income shows a statistically significant result with bootstrapped standard errors and the Average treatment effect for treated of the radius, kernel and nearest neighbor matching is 2166.83 birr where as the ATT of the stratification matching is 1917.55 birr per as compared to the control groups. Thus, the result of ATT shows a significant income difference. And the ratio of the average income per family size of the household head per year is 1870.71 birr.