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Abstract
Agricultural productivity including of permanent crops including banana remains low in Tanzania due to dependency on rain-fed agriculture and majority of small-scale farmers have not adopted irrigation. Fostering productivity of banana crop in Tanzania requires understanding on drivers of adopting irrigation and its effects among small-scale farmers. Studies on the productivity effect of adopting irrigation among small-scale permanent crop such as banana farmers are scanty in Sub-Saharan Africa including Tanzania. Also, extant studies on the productivity effect of adopting irrigation have not applied meta-frontier analysis method while accounting for selection bias. Thus, this study covered such lacuna by assessing the effect of adopting irrigation on productivity among small-scale banana farmers in Tanzania. This study applied dataset from the National Sample Census on Agriculture [NSCA] of 2019/2020 with the sample of 6,008 small-scale banana farmers in Tanzania. Our study found adoption of irrigation in banana farming is driven by irrigation scheme in the village, female-headed households, banana area and banana farmers residing in the central, eastern and northern agroecological zones. Also, we find adopting irrigation improves productivity of small-scale banana farmers. Furthermore, our study emphasizes on the designing of the sustainable irrigation schemes in villages as relevant policy options for adoption of irrigation and thus, improving productivity of small-scale permanent crops farmers particularly banana farmers.