Heterogeneous Effects of Horticulture Commercialization and Gender-based Decision-making on Smallholder Farmers’ Income: Evidence From a Quasi-experimental Study in Jimma Zone, Ethiopia

Highlights:
・The SHEP intervention through commercialization demonstrate positive heterogeneous effects on horticulture income.
・Distance to agricultural cooperatives, have significantly heterogeneous effects on horticulture income.
・Market-oriented agricultural extension approaches improve smallholder farmers' horticulture income.

This paper assesses the heterogeneous impact of horticulture commercialization and gender-based decision-making on smallholder farmers' income. We also assess the impact of Ethio-SHEP intervention through commercialization and joint decision-making. This study accounts for spatial agricultural peculiarities at the kebele level during the sampling design to minimize differences among groups and allow for the construction of more comparable control groups. It also analyzes important socioeconomic and institutional factors such as training, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, proximity to agricultural cooperatives, and land area for horticultural production that affect each horticultural income group. The results of this study highlight important factors that shape the different income groups of small-scale farmers in horticultural agriculture in the Jimma region of Ethiopia, and provide important implications for considering measures for each income group. On the other hand, an important limitation of this paper is that the current analysis is based on data at the end of the project and does not assess changes before and after the introduction of SHEP. Therefore, this study is not able to evaluate changes such as the transition of low-income groups to middle-income groups as a result of the SHEP intervention. Therefore, future analysis using panel data is required to more accurately assess what changes occurred before and after the project.