Abstract

Water shortage is a global problem. It is predominantly visible in the agricultural sector and in farming communities. Togo is not an exception in this regard because some rural agricultural communities do not have access to water but rely on distance conveyance. Government is under constitutional obligation to supply water in rural areas to boost crop production off rain seasons especially. Can Government Water subsidy improve smallholder farmers’ nutrition? This study, therefore, aims at investigating the impact of Government Water Supply (GWS) on the household of Kara agricultural region in Togo. A two-stage sampling procedure was employed to collect panel data during 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 cropping seasons. Different from previous studies, robust fixed effects regression is used to model the effect of government water subsidy. The core findings reveal that water subsidy improves farm household’s nutrition. The results also indicate that subsidized water influences available per capita calories per day, household’s months of good nutrition, and the probability of being well nourished from own production of cereals and legumes but has statistically insignificant effects on household annual consumption expenditure. The results provide several valuable insights from the policy point of view. A water supply subsidy program has a higher and better influence on the maximum good nutrition, bringing up the question of whether targeting households in the lowest food crops production percentiles give value for money to achieve the goal of sustainable nutrition.

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