Effect of Small-Scale Irrigation on Household Food Security in the case of Gombora Woreda

Abstract

Agriculture is the leading sector as a source of income, employment creation, source of foreign exchange, and national economic growth. The main objective of this study was to analyze the effect of small-scale irrigation on household food security in Gombora woreda. A multi-stage random sampling procedure was used to select sample respondents. Data was collected from318 households and analyzed with the help of various descriptive and econometric analysis techniques. Propensity score matching model was used to achieve the objective of the study. The household food balance model result revealed that out of sampled households 56.29% were food secured while 43.71% were food insecure. The gap in food calorie availability was high ranging from 420-9513kcal/AE /day in the study area. Out of 121 irrigators, 71.07% of them were food secured; whereas only 47.21% of the total 197 non-irrigator were food secured. A study result also identified major constraints of small-scale irrigation as occurrences of pests and diseases, poor irrigation method practices, and lack of input supply and irrigation facilities. A binary logistic regression was applied to estimate factors affecting participation in small-scale irrigation and the result showed that gender, age, family labor, education, cultivated land size, access to credit services, oxen owned, and distance from irrigation site were the variables that significantly affected. To analyze the impact of small-scale irrigation on household food security, the propensity score matching method was applied. A kernel matching with a bandwidth of 0.1 was the matching algorithm used. The quality of covariate balancing was checked using pseudo-R2, mean bias, and t-test. Finally, the Average Treatment Effect on Treated was estimated and the result revealed that irrigation users households on average intake daily calories of 863kcal more than non-users and, this result is statistically significant. The sensitivity analysis result revealed that the impact result estimated by this study was insensitive to unobserved selection bias. The study concluded that small-scale irrigation is one of the viable solutions for households to secure food. Therefore, it is recommended that Gombora woreda government and nongovernmental organizations should expand small-scale irrigation to farm households to improve their food security