Impact of Ethiopia's productive safety net program on manure use by rural households: Evidence from Tigrai, Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

Although development intervention programs can have far‐reaching impacts beyond their stated objective, there have been few careful studies on associated but unintended outcomes of such programs. This study assesses the impact of membership in the public works component of Ethiopia's productive safety net program (PSNP) on whether households use manure and the amount of it they use. This is done using the double‐hurdle method based on survey data of 2015 on 11 agro‐climatically diverse districts of the Tigrai region in Northern Ethiopia. Results show that PSNP member households are not different from their nonmember counterparts in terms of manure use. This may indicate that PSNP is helping member households catch up with nonmember households in terms of manure use, even though they have smaller livestock ownership. This might indicate that PSNP member households are becoming more aware of the benefits of using manure, and hence are using available manure more efficiently. Therefore, this could be taken as one additional positive contribution of the PSNP in Ethiopia's endeavor to improve food security of poor rural farm households by increasing their productivity.