Does participation in communal water management improve household income? Evidence from Malawi

This paper presents empirical evidence of whether participation in community water resource management improves household agricultural income using a case study of irrigation co-management under the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme in Malawi. An endogenous switching regression was applied on a dataset of 412 farmers to correct the outcome (net agricultural income) for sample selection bias. Propensity score matching was then used to measure the impact of participation in irrigation co-management on net annual agricultural income. Despite variations in the magnitude of benefits among different groups, empirical evidence suggests that net annual agricultural income of the poor, youths and female-headed farmers participating in the scheme would have worsened had they not participated in the scheme.