Assessing the growth potential of farmer-led irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa

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This research will contribute to answering the question "what institutions and policies lead to investment in irrigation by individual farmers, groups of farmers and large-scale enterprises?" under the first DEGRP theme "Agriculture and Growth". The project will assess whether current investment by farmers in small-scale irrigation might offer a model for broad-based economic growth in rural areas of Africa. The research is timely because, after nearly two decades of stalled irrigation investment due to poor performance of irrigation projects in Africa in the 1970s, international commitment to funding African irrigation is growing rapidly as a response to rising food prices and the continuing stagnation of African agricultural productivity. However, funding commitments are yet to be informed by systematic analysis of how irrigation actually works in today's farming contexts in Africa, leading to uncertainty about choices of technology and forms of social organisation needed, and concerns that implementation of large-scale irrigation will repeat past problems and not achieve broad-based economic growth.This study will respond to this gap by bringing together social science researchers from the UK and irrigation scientists from the Netherlands to work with African researchers in Mozambique and Tanzania on case studies of contemporary irrigation in Africa. The studies will focus on cases where there is evidence that small-scale farmers are investing in irrigation, including the construction of furrows to divert streams, the management of wetter lowlands to grow rice, and the adoption of new low-cost pump technologies and drip irrigation. Each study will develop an analysis of these irrigation developments from a local and a national perspective. At a local level, a combination of interviews and questionnaire surveys will be used to identify why farmers do, or do not, invest in irrigation, the kinds of technical and financial support they can obtain, the changes in agricultural productivity they achieve, and the wider social and economic consequences, particularly for people (e.g. women, younger men, and those recently-settled in the area) whose rights to use land and water are typically subordinate to others in hierarchical systems of local governance. Case study findings will be presented for discussion by communities participating in the study. At a national level, interviews and workshops with policy-makers in both international development agencies and government, and with non-government organisations and commercial suppliers of irrigation equipment, will be used to provide an analysis of these agencies' perceptions of 'farmer-led' irrigation development and the extent to which such development is supported by policy. The countries selected provide strongly contrasting policy environments, Tanzania having recognised and supported farmer-initiated irrigation in the past whereas Mozambique has not. Project findings will be disseminated internationally through open access publication in peer-reviewed academic journals, and through engagement with an international advisory group including academic and 'end user' representatives. At a national level, the project will undertake workshops with officials and policy-makers on irrigation in both Tanzania and Mozambique both during inception and after completion of the local-level fieldwork on irrigation case studies. Research findings will also contribute to curriculum development by the African research partners.