Economic Contributions of Jima Ganati Farmers’ Cooperative Union to Farmers: The Case of Maize Producer Farmers

This article investigates the impact evaluation of Jima Ganati farmers’ cooperative union intervention in economic activities which is measured in terms of income and productivity as the best means to improve the living standard of farmers’ household. For this, cross-sectional data were collected from 280 households purposively selected from five kebeles consisting of 204 member farmers and 76 non-member farmers. The analytical procedure has involved two stages: in the first stage, descriptive analyses were used to detect existence of difference in various outcome indicators between member farmers and non-member farmers. In the second stage, I applied a semi-parametric impact evaluation method of propensity score matching with some matching algorithms to estimate the impact of the intervention on various impact indicators. Combined use of these alternative estimation techniques has enabled us to arrive at consistent results. Our results show that member farmers scored statistically significant higher maize crop income test score than non-member farmers and they are also identified with statistically significant higher total productivity. Although the crop income and productivity test scores show significant changes, some constraints were identifiedin the economic contributions of the cooperative union to farmersand theseinclude: high turnover of the union mangers, lack of skill in cooperative development, rent seeking behavior of the cooperative leaders, lack oftransparency, Accordingly, a number of recommendations are suggested