| Abstract: | Investment in irrigation can relieve agro-pastoralists from high dependence on rainfall, increases irrigated farmland, encourages agro-pastoralists to produce two or three times in a year and provide job for the poor. However, it is not well known to what extent agro-pastoralist households who are practicing irrigation are better off than pastoralist households which are not practicing irrigation in the study area Genale-Dawa livelihood zone. Given this fact, this study tried to provide explicit empirical evidences through comparing irrigation based livelihood of agro-pastoralists with pastoralist households. The study also assessed challenges encountered by agro-pastoralist households during irrigation intervene. In this study, multi-stage and simple systematic random sampling procedure were applied for the selection of sample respondents and accordingly 66 (33 agro-pastoralists and 33 pastoralists) households were selected from the same livelihood zone to minimize heterogeneity except irrigation practice and interviewed based on developed structured and semi-structured questionnaires. The only differences livelihood between the sampled agro-pastoralist and pastoralist households were practicing irrigation even if they are living the same livelihood zone. River water is the only source for irrigation in the area. Beside structured and semi-structured questionnaires, 4 FGD discussions and 10 key informant interview were made. Moreover, secondary data were collected from literatures, books, internet, and reports of governmental and non-governmental organizations. Statistical descriptive method was employed to compare the livelihood of irrigation based agro-pastoralist with pastoralist households and challenges that affecting agro-pastoralists and pastoralists in the study area by using SPSS software. The study result shows that the major challenges encountered in practicing irrigation that respondents from agro-pastoralists have stressed are loss of water and easily damage of soil fenced canal in the study area. Moreover the study shows that irrigation practice also affected by gender of the household head, accessibility to river and education level of the household head.
On the comparison of income of irrigation based agro-pastoralist and pastoralist shows that, the total annual household income in the study area was ETB 176,185.58 (123,374.76 ETB for agro-pastoralist and 52,810.82 ETB for pastoralist households), from this total annual income of a household, livestock contributes the highest income share (57.2%), cropping (31.5%) and off-farm
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(11.3%), respectively. Agro-pastoralist households earn higher income from cropping than pastoralist households, which is indicating that irrigation practice increases household farm incomes. In terms of annual aggregate income which showed in the study agro-pastoralist was significantly higher income and has 70,563.94 ETB difference compared to the annual income of pastoralist households. This implies that the probability of being poor decreases if one has engaged in crop cultivation, other factors being constant. Moreover, this suggests that engaged in crop cultivation has significant contribution on improving annual income than only being pastoralist. |
