article · Heliyon
Adopting alternative agricultural technologies substantially improves living standards in rural Ethiopia by raising household consumption and lowering poverty levels. An analysis of survey data from 2,316 farm households demonstrates that combining multiple agricultural technologies into a package generates greater gains in food and total consumption per adult than adopting single solutions in isolation. Uptake depends on a wide range of factors, including educational attainment, access to credit and agricultural extension visits, land certification, farm size, and soil quality. Geography, environmental conditions such as soil wetness, remittance income, livestock ownership, and engagement in off-farm activities also significantly influence a household's willingness and ability to adopt new practices. These insights highlight the value of promoting bundled agricultural solutions alongside supporting infrastructure to maximise economic benefits for smallholders.
Poverty in rural agrarian communities remains a critical challenge across sub-Saharan Africa. Demonstrating that technological packages deliver superior welfare outcomes compared to individual interventions helps policymakers, non-governmental organisations, and rural development agencies design more effective interventions. The findings show that improving access to inputs, credit, and extension services can significantly elevate household consumption and food security.
The findings inform agricultural extension programmes, input suppliers, and agritech providers seeking to bundle and distribute farming solutions to smallholders. Because the study relies on retrospective survey data rather than testing a specific product, the research represents applied socioeconomic evaluation rather than a near-market technology. However, commercial vendors and financial service providers can utilise the identified determinants, such as credit access and land certification, to design targeted delivery models for rural markets.
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The purpose of this study is to understand how the adoption of different agricultural technologies can reduce poverty in rural regions of Ethiopia. To attain this objective, this paper uses a comprehensive socio-economic survey of Ethiopia, which allows us to securitize the household level information. The paper uses a multinomial endogenous switching regression model to estimate the impact of alternative technologies adoption on poverty reduction on a sample of 2316 farm households, and a multinomial logit model to estimate the determinants of alternative agricultural technologies adoption. The results showed that the decision to adopt alternative agricultural technologies depends on several variables such as education, regional heterogeneity, remittance income, extension visit, credit access, off-farm activity, soil quality, farm size, tropical livestock unit, distance, plot's potential wetness, and ownership certification. The impact results of the study show that household consumption increases when households adopt alternative agricultural technologies, thereby reducing their poverty. Furthermore, adoption of a package of technologies can result in higher food and total consumption per adult than single technology adoption. The paper recommends strategies for further disseminating and scaling up these technologies to help reduce poverty in Ethiopia.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09495
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