Adoption of Rainwater Harvesting Technology: The Case of Rural Kebeles of Dire Dawa Administration

Dire Dawa administration has been invested a huge amount of money, time and effort in order to introduce Rainwater Harvesting Technology in rural kebeles. The attempt made didn’t yield the expected result and the adoptions of the technology without project initiatives are limited. The possible reasons for not adopting have not been studied in the study areas and most of previous studies on Rainwater Harvesting Technology assume a single technology without considering the correlation that exists between different technologies. Therefore, this study was undertaken to address this gap. To identify sample households, multistage sampling techniques were applied. Primary data gathered from 385 randomly selected sample households and secondary data were collected from various secondary sources to supplement the primary data. Descriptive Statistics, binary logit and multivariate probit model were used to analyze the data. The result of the binary logit model indicated that education, livestock ownership, farm income, non-farm income, access to irrigation, access to credit and frequency of extension contact were found to have positive and significant influence on adoption of Rainwater Harvesting Technology, while age of household head, farm size, nature of slop and plot distance from dwelling had shown negative and were significant variables influenced adoption of RWH technology. A multivariate probit regression result revealed that Rainwater Harvesting Technologies are jointly correlated; suggesting that a technology decision to be adopted is tied to another technology decision to be adopted. The result of household income analysis shows that average annual income of adopter and non adopter was 32,986.36 Birr per year and 21,217.76 Birr per year respectively. This indicates that RWH technology has increased their income by 11,768.60 birr/year on average than non adopter. Based on the preceding fact it is good to recommend that the adoption and promotion of Rainwater Harvesting Technologies should follow a holistic approach and scaling up of Rainwater Harvesting Technology should be given due attention by all stakeholders including farm households and attempt must be made to mitigate factors affecting adoption of the technology.