Modelling the farm household impacts of a small irrigation program in Niger

Small irrigation schemes have become very popular in many African countries as a policy measure to boost agriculture and farm income given their relatively low capital investment compared with to large irrigation infrastructures and the shorter time required for the project design and implementation. This paper attempts to explore the likely impacts of a program of small irrigation development in Niger on land allocation, agricultural production, food security and poverty reduction on a nationally representative sample of farm households. A farm-household model, named FSSIM-Dev (Farm System Simulator for Developing Countries), is used to achieve this objective. This static positive programming model was applied to every individual farm household included in the 2011-2012 LSMS-ISA survey sample – around 2300 farm households – in order to guarantee the highest representativeness of the farming systems and to capture the full heterogeneity across farm households. Results show that irrigation has a large impact on agriculture production and income of smallholder farmers, mainly during the dry season and in the regions with high potential irrigable land. Farm income would increase by around 7 % at country level if small irrigation was made available to all farmers. At the regional and individual farm levels the impact is more pronounced (reaching more than 80 % in one region). Additionally, the income impacts are larger for those households with the lowest agricultural income in the baseline, showing the large potential impacts of small irrigation in terms of poverty and inequality reduction.