Asssesing the effectiveness and impact of agricultural water management interventions: the case of small reservoirs in northern Ghana
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Date
2018
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Publisher
Elsevier
Abstract
Agricultural water management, particularly management of multi-purpose small reservoirs (SRs) in drier sa vanna
areas of the northern Ghana, is being promoted as a key solution to improve agricultural production,
enhance food security and livelihoods of smallholder farm households. However, little empirical evidence exist
on how effective these small water infrastructures are in terms of delivering multiple benefits and their impact
on the livelihood of smallholder farmers. This study assessed the effectiveness and impact of the small reservoirs
on smallholder vegetable farmers in northern Ghana. A participatory rating method using a 5-point Likert-scale
was used to assess the effectiveness of SRs in delivering multiple livelihood benefits and an endogenous
switching regression model was applied to assess the SRs’ impact using a primary data collected from 328
randomly sampled vegetable farmers. Results from the Likert scale analysis show that most of the SRs are either
dysfunctional or underutilized and not effective in delivering multiple benefits. Results from the endogenous
switching regression model show that there is only about 3% increase in the income of vegetable farmers
participating in irrigated vegetable production using SRs against the counterfactual situation but this change is
insignificant statistically. The current low level effectiveness and impact of SRs could be enhanced by improving
their management, for example, through the provision of incentive mechanisms such as subsidies to the private
sector involvement in rehabilitation, management and irrigation service provision and strengthening the ca pacity of
existing water users associations. Furthermore, small reserviors should be recognized not only as water
sources for small scale irrigation but also as providers of multiple livelihood benefits to local communities and
consequently should attract due attention in public resource allocation in their rehabilitation and management/
institutional capacity building.
Description
This article is published by Elsevier, 2018 and is also available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2018.07.009
Keywords
Citation
Agriculture water management 209 (2018) 163-170