An Evaluation of Climate Mitigation Adoption Technologies in Improving Rural Households’ Livelihood Outcomes: The Case of Eastern Oromia, Ethiopia

Agricultural technologies are seen as an important route out of poverty in most of the developing countries. However, the rates of adoption of these technologies have remained low in most of these countries. This study aim at shedding some light on an evaluation of climate mitigation agricultural adoption technologies, and its contribution to rural livelihood outcomes in Gurawa district using cross sectional data collected from randomly selected 180 sample households during the 2016 crop production season. Multivariate probit and Propensity score matching was used to identify impacts of adoption technologies, and to identify factors affecting smallholder farmers’ multiple technology adoption decisions. The results showed that the probability of adoption of agricultural technologies are influenced by several factors: family size, economical active members, education level, age of the household head, social status, soil fertility status, distance from extension office, land holding, distance to markets and distance to weather road. The impact evaluation results indicated that on average, the participation household in soil conservation has increased food security status and asset accumulation nearly by 38% and 15%, respectively, however it decreases the rate of poverty nearly by 51 percent. Use of improved seeds increased food security status and decreased poverty rate nearly by 38% and 44%, respectively. On the other hand, use of irrigation technology increased food security status and asset accumulation nearly by 23% and 31.8%, respectively, whereas it decreases the rate of poverty nearly by 29 percent. Similarly, adoption of row planting methods increased food security status and asset accumulation nearly by 28.7% and 15.5%, respectively, whereas it decreases the rate of poverty nearly by 51.5 percent. Therefore, policy makers should give due emphasis to the aforementioned variables to increase adoption technologies and improve the livelihood of the rural households.