Innovations to Promote Growth among Small-scale Irrigators in Africa: An Ethnographic and Knowledge-Exchange Approach

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If policy-makers are to foster growth in most developing countries today, where economies remain heavily focused on agriculture, they must choose which of two ongoing trends to support. The choice is especially clear in sub-Saharan Africa, where suitable land and water for cultivation are scarce and where climate change is underway, compounding the shortages caused by population expansion. They can endorse the neocolonial trend of allowing foreign corporations to acquire the best land and water in order to work large holdings entirely for export. Or they can nurture the capacity of small farmers and irrigators in existing communities to grow crops for household subsistence while also producing a surplus, or even other special cash crops, for sale in domestic and international markets. The proposed research would attempt to do the latter by encouraging innovation, in a novel effort to enhance local food security while increasing cash incomes and fostering market growth. The aim is to increase the capacity of households and communities to produce for both purposes while also adapting to climate change, by promoting technologies that improve the efficiency with which basic resources are utilized, particularly water. These technologies-including both 'hard' and 'soft' types, new ones as well as old-have been adopted by farmers in certain parts of Tanzania, Malawi, and Bangladesh, in dynamic irrigation communities that would be sites of the proposed research. The study would first explore these local adaptations ethnographically in three selected villages, and then sponsor a programme of reciprocal knowledge exchange between their water-user groups. By means of the latter, the project would seek to expand the options available to the farmers residing in each place, thereby influencing--in ways that cannot be predicted but can be carefully observed--the direction and pace of change. Of great value in its own right, as a comparative study of adaptations to emerging rural markets and to climate change, the research would also break new ground in the field of participatory development.