The impact of micro-irrigation on households’ welfare in the northern part of Ethiopia: an endogenous switching regression approach

The paper uses an endogenous switching regression model to measure the impact of participation in micro-irrigation development on households’ welfare. The model takes into account selection bias associated with programme participation and endogeneity problems often encountered in most programme evaluations. A total of 482 households (195 irrigation users and 287 non-users) were used to generate all the necessary variables. To capture the impact of the irrigation on household welfare, two indicators were consideredv namely household farm income (Y) and household fixed asset formation (F) (evaluated at market Price during the survey period). The results show a positive and significant impact of irrigation use on the two outcome variables: income by 8.8 per cent and asset formation by 186 per cent as compared to non-users. This shows how important the micro-irrigation schemes are in improving the welfare of poor farmers in the research areas. Furthermore, the empirical results show that the probability of using one of the water sources (irrigation scheme) is associated with farm experience (age as proxy), farmer-to-farmer contact (the existence of an irrigation user neighbour), family size, the state of credit constraint, the number of visits by extension agents and the cost of irrigation development. As a robustness check, different models were applied and results were found consistent, both qualitatively and quantitatively.