Cambodia: Empowering farmers with knowledge and sustainable water supply
Extreme weather events and deteriorating soil fertility severely affects rural societies, pushing local inhabitants to move away. Investments in small-scale water infrastructure and targeted trainings on climate resilient practices can help revert the trend.
Intervention
This 4-year project (2017-2020) has been designed to reduce the vulnerability of rural Cambodians, especially land-poor, landless and/or women-headed households through investments in small-scale water management infrastructure, technical assistance to resilient agricultural practices, and capacity building support, especially targeting poor women, for improved food production in home gardens. The objective of the project was, therefore, is to improve sub-national administration systems affecting investments in rural livelihoods through climate sensitive planning, budgeting and execution.
Impact Evaluation timeline
Approaches to assess the impact
The study used a DID methodology to assess the impact of the project’s intervention. The total number of respondents for the baseline was 1,563 HHs (726 treatment and 837 control) whereas the endline sample was 1,219 (551 treatment and 668 control). The sample used for IE analysis comprised 1,193 HHs. Among them, there were 553 HHs respondents from treatment villages, and 640 from control villages. The SRL project’s impacts were focused on the seven impact indicators; i) changes in freshwater availability for household and agricultural consumption; ii) changes in perception of climate change incidences and vulnerability; iii) changes in yield from rice production; iv) changes in amount of farmland left fallowed; v) changes in efforts and Yield of home-gardening; vi) changes in migration behavior; vii) changes in income from agriculture and related activities. The results of the impact analysis show; i) positive and significant impact on the total annual household income; and ii) chicken, vegetable, and rice sales. Further, the project has significant impacts on perceptual and attitudinal change like; I) rice farming behavior; ii) migration behavior; iii) water access and climate vulnerability.
