Abstract
Spate irrigation is the diversion of floods running off from mountainous catchments, diverted by hydraulic structures and applied to low-lying irrigable fields in arid and semi-arid areas to improve farmers' livelihood. Despite its higher potential to support the livelihood of farmers, spate irrigation has received less emphasis. Given this, the study attempted to determine factors affecting farmers' adoption of spate irrigation. The study was carried out in 2018 on 150 households selected using systematic sampling from three irrigation schemes located along the Guguf stream, northern Ethiopia. A questionnaire with 0.82 reliability was employed for the collection of the required data and analyzed using binary logistic regression model. Results revealed that out of the sixteen explanatory variables entered into the binary logit model nine of them were found statistically significant at (p 0.10) to estimate the likelihood of farmers' participation in spate irrigation. These are a distance of plot from diversion head and residence, sex of household head, livestock in the tropical unit, farm size, farm experience, farm ownership, spate water availability and age of the household head. Thus, training, market support and supporting females are required. Keywords: Guguf, spate irrigation, adoption, Weynalem, Waekel, Kusra, Northern Ethiopia DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/64-02 Publication date: May 31 st 2020
Highlights
Water is associated with life (Abrha, 2006)
Spate irrigation is the diversion of floods running off from mountainous catchments, diverted by hydraulic structures and applied to low-lying irrigable fields in arid and semi-arid areas to improve farmers' livelihood
Despite its higher potential to support the livelihood of farmers and achieve food security, adoption of flood irrigation has received a little attention
Summary
Water is associated with life (Abrha, 2006). Most notably, access to safe and sufficient water is a basic human right. In arid and semi-arid areas, water is scarce. The allocation of this scarce resource is a major challenge for people living in these areas (Abraham Mehari, 2007). According to David & Ploeger (2014), approximately 2.8 billion people live in river basins affected by physical water scarcity. Studies show that about 270 million ha in the world is irrigated (Dejen, 2011) but its contribution to global food production is 40%. 6% of the 209 million ha arable land in Africa is under irrigation. In Ethiopia, the situation is even worse with irrigated land of only accounting for 170 thousand ha of the 3.5 million ha irrigation potential (Haile, 2015). The country has not yet been capable to meet the basic food demand of its rapidly growing population
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