Abstract
Sectoral economic growth data in Ethiopia show that the agriculture sector has the lowest growth, which is caused by frequent drought and inefficient technologies, among other factors. As a result, the productivities of land and labor, as well as the income of small-scale farm households, are very low, and rural areas have a relatively high poverty rate. A quasi-experiment was applied to understand the impact of using small-scale irrigation motor pumps on farmers’ livelihood improvement. Specifically, a survey was conducted in 2019 on a sample of 92 small-scale irrigation motor pump and canal irrigation users as the treatment and control groups. The weighted propensity score matching method was applied to eliminate initial differences and adjust sampling proportions across the groups. Based on the average treatment effect on the treated estimation results, we cannot state that the mean income difference in small-scale irrigation motor pump users and canal irrigation system users is different from zero. This indicates that countries with little capital to invest in large-scale irrigation projects can introduce household-level small-scale irrigation motor pumps to improve farmers’ incomes.
Highlights
Ethiopia has been one of the fastest-growing economies worldwide since 2003/2004, with an average real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 10.1% [1,2]
To estimate the propensity scores (PS), we included covariates associated with the treatment assignment and outcome variable, as well as weights for each sample, to balance the sampling rate difference [31]
The number of people in the family classified as the working labor force and who owned farmland were the covariates included in the PS estimation
Summary
Ethiopia has been one of the fastest-growing economies worldwide since 2003/2004, with an average real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 10.1% [1,2]. Agriculture is dependent on natural rainfall and is affected by drought, which negatively affects production and productivity This results in the prevalence of a relatively high poverty rate in rural areas, an average of 25.6%, whereas the urban poverty rate is 14.8% [4,5]. The expected income of any individual farmer is given by: Yi. We constructed a comparison group of non-SSIMP users conditional on propensity scores, P(X). We applied ATE to evaluate the impact differences between two experimental groups with different treatments: SSIMP and SSCIS users. Selection bias was cleared by PSM, and the difference in the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT(E)) of the two groups is the ATT(E) of using SSIMPs on motor pump users [25,26].
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