Impact of soil and water conservation improvement on the welfare of smallholder farmers in Southern Malawi

This study utilised full Mahalanobis matching and a variety of propensity score matching methods to adjust for pre-treatment observable differences between treated and untreated groups for measuring the impact of technologies. Data were collected from 619 smallholder farmers in the districts of Nsanje and Balaka in southern Malawi during 2014-2015 cropping season. There was a 27% significant reduction in per capita income as a result of farmer’s involvement in soil and water conservation technologies. Similarly, there was an 8% reduction in per capita expenditure among farmers involved in soil and water conservation technologies. Although households practicing the technologies realized nominally higher yields, the yield differences between them and those not practicing were non-significant. The study concluded that adoption of soil and water conservation technologies did not improve the incomes of small-scale farmers in the study areas. These results were surprising but could be attributed to a lack of technical expertise in implementing soil and water conservation practices and a tendency of rural impoverished respondents expectant to receive handouts to hold back information. Despite these observations, there is need for increased effort to further explore soil and water conservation technologies among rural households by providing technical backstopping on their design and implementation.