Determinants of differential access to irrigation practices among smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

There are debates among scholars regarding the accessibility of irrigation to smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. Some scholars argue that smallholder farmers do not have access to irrigation, though the country has abundant water sources. Other scholars have noticed that the government has launched initiatives to ensure the accessibility of irrigation to smallholder farmers. This paper investigates differential access to irrigation for smallholder farmers and its determinants in Ethiopia. Researchers used data from the Ethiopian Living Standards Measurement Study collected in 2018/19 to conduct the research. The binary logit model was employed to scrutinize the determinant factors of access to irrigation. The findings reveal that only 11.34% of smallholders have access to irrigation practices in Ethiopia. The results suggest that smallholder farmers have differential access to irrigation due to climate variability and diverse topography. Further, the results reveal that farm types, sex, marital status, extension participation, distance from the market, education level, and watershed participation are determinant factors in differential irrigation accessibility to them. Watershed participation and irrigation water sources, that influence highly, increase the probability of irrigation access by 13.4% and 10.2% respectively. The study concludes that Ethiopia’s smallholder farmers’ access to irrigation practices is unevenly distributed. In this paper, we recommend that the government should organize farmers into clusters and invest in irrigation to increase smallholder farmers’ irrigation accessibility and maintain household food security.