Abstract
Irrigation investments have enormous potential to improve the lives of smallholder farmers who otherwise depend on rain-fed agriculture, through increasing yields, adding additional cultivating seasons, and reducing risk. Realizing these benefits often requires smallholders to simultaneously coordinate operations and maintenance (O&M) of the irrigation infrastructure and shift agricultural technologies. As a result, many of these investments are wasted due either to public goods market failures or limited adoption of new agricultural techniques. We simultaneously experimentally vary governance structures, access to complementary agricultural technologies, and the rollout of taxes on usage of the system within hillside irrigation schemes in Rwanda to test these hypothesized barriers to efficiency. Moreover, we exploit both a spatial discontinuity in the boundary of the schemes to evaluate the overall impact of access to irrigation. Lastly, we use variation in the nature of spillovers from both coordinating O&M and technology adoption driven by the size and composition of water user groups and the location of smallholder plots within each water user group to identify model driven effect heterogeneity.