Household participation in Payments for Ecosystem Services: A case study from Mozambique

• Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is one of the alternative ways proposed to achieve better conservation purposes by financially linking beneficiaries of ecosystem services to households managing resources that provide the services.
• The study was based on household samples from Bué Maria, Mutiabamba, Munhangana and N'hambita Villages. Detailed information on households and their experience with these parameters was obtained by conducting a random survey to 115 heads of households in the selected villages of N'hambita community from January to April 2012.
• Multiple analytic techniques were used to understand factors influencing the households' participation in N'hambita Community Carbon Program.
• The regression analysis shows that gender, marital status, age of the households, educational level of the head, size of the farm land, living distance from the project center centre and source of income were important variables explaining the level of participation for all three participation factors.

The success of the PES programme in developing countries depends on the active participation and contribution of rural households. This paper investigates the factors influencing rural households' decision to participate in the PES programme in the N'hambita Community in Sofala Province, Mozambique, based on data collected through a survey of 115 households, using factor analysis and multiple regressions. Factor analysis has shown that the main factors influencing the household decision to participate in the programme are latent variables labelled as economic benefits, followed by social inclusion and forest conservation accounting, with 31%, 19% and 14% of the total variance respectively. Multinomial logistic regression demonstrates that the gender, marital status, household age, the educational level of the head, land area, distance from the project centre and source of income are important variables in explaining the level of participation of the three factors.