RURAL HOUSEHOLDS’ WILLINGNESS TO PARTICIPATE IN PROSOPIS juliflora MANAGEMENT PRACTICES: THE CASE OF AFAR REGION, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

Nowadays, rural households’ economic reduction and livelihood deformation due to invasion of invasive alien species, such as Prosopis juliflora, is the prominent problem that Afar region of Ethiopia is facing. In the process of alleviating this problem, different Prosopis juliflora management practices have been developed and under implementation by Woody Weeds Project in the region. Hence, this study assesses rural households’ willingness to participate in those management practices through a contingent valuation method in the most invaded region (Afar) of the country. In doing this, double bounded dichotomous choice with an open-ended follow up format was used to elicit households’ willingness to participate using data collected from randomly selected 323 sample households from eight kebele’s using multi stage sampling. The result from 313 valid responses showed that 293 (93.61%) households were willing to participate in Prosopis juliflora management whereas the remaining 20 (6.39%) households were not. This asserts that the proposed intervention was highly accepted by the majority of the sampled households. Consequently, seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model result shows that the mean willingness to pay was about 45.94 person days per annum. Accordingly, by using this mean willingness to pay value, the welfare gain from the intervention was computed to be 943,332 labor days (113,199,840 ETB) per year. Moreover, the seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model results indicate, sex, family size, tenure security, livestock holding, frequency of extension contact and years lived in the area were the important factors influencing the willingness to participate in Prosopis juliflora management practices positively whereas, age, off/non-farm income and bid value affects willingness to pay negatively and significantly. Hence, to improve the participation level of the households, policy makers should target on these variables.