• Energy Research

Janwillem Liebrand, Wouter Beekman, Chris de Bont and Gert Jan Veldwisch demonstrate that in spite of large investment in top-down large scale irrigation schemes, bottom up and farmers-driven irrigation should not be underestimated. After a twenty-year hiatus in public investments in agriculture and irrigation, donors, as well as many national governments in Africa, have increased their loan - and grant budgets, and national budgets respectively. It marks a change in a liberalization agenda that has its origin in the 1980s, and shows that agriculture and irrigation are back on the global development agenda. In the current research-policy debate in Africa, a major focus of the investments in agriculture is extending the area under reliable water control systems for irrigation, based on a set of persuasive assumptions on the potential of modern technology in agriculture. These assumptions frame the question of ‘agricultural productivity’ in very narrow ways and limit the analysis of complex dynamics and impacts of flows of investments in agriculture and irrigation on the ground. Notably, they underpin a policy debate in which farmers’ initiatives in developing irrigation in Africa are grossly overlooked, and support a tendency to disregard farmers’ diverse livelihoods and aspirations, with the risk that they are left behind.

Smallholder irrigation technologies introduced in sub-Saharan Africa are often unsustainable in the sense that they are not maintained by their users. In contrast, there is clear evidence that smallholder farmers have been developing and expanding irrigated areas. An approach was developed that takes these farmers’ initiatives as a starting point to stimulate further irrigated agricultural expansion in central Mozambique, dubbed the PIAD approach (Participatory Irrigated Agricultural Development). The approach was documented through field diaries, participatory monitoring and evaluation. This article presents an analysis and reflection on the design process. Amongst other things, it shows that a crucial difference is the division of roles between users, contractors and irrigation engineers, both in terms of division of responsibilities and in understanding the interdisciplinary connections of irrigated agricultural production. The approach allowed users to be kept in the driver’s seat of development while going beyond improving irrigation infrastructure, including agronomic and institutional interventions. Additionally, the results show that technologies are being sustained by their users and copied by farmers in neighboring areas. We conclude that the approach allows for active investment by the users, both in design as well as in project costs and labor, which later results in the improvements being maintained and copied, a clear marker of sustainability.

In spite of the investment and efforts made for irrigation development, many irrigation schemes in Ethiopia are performing below design expectations leaving huge areas and many beneficiaries out of irrigation. In this study, a systematic literature review was conducted on management practices, problems and future directions of community managed small-scale irrigation schemes in Ethiopia. Out of 1282 published research reports retrieved from the data bases of Web of Science and Scopus, eventually 83 publications fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Failure and under-performance of irrigation schemes in Ethiopia is reported to mostly relate to problems during design and implementation and/or operation and maintenance. Low level of community participation, lack of site specific reliable hydrological data, poorly designed irrigation infrastructures, high construction cost and delayed project completion are most mentioned problems during the design and implementation phases of irrigation projects. Presence of weak local scheme managing institutions and users’ exclusion in management decisions are among the main problems of small-scale irrigation management practices in Ethiopia. Regardless of their water sources, irrigation schemes face similar problems in Ethiopia. Adoption of a holistic development and management strategy that integrates technical, socio-economic and environmental aspects is needed to overcome problems and sustainability challenges of community managed irrigation schemes in Ethiopia. Supporting the irrigation sector via research-based findings and adoption of advanced technologies needs further investments and efforts to narrow challenges of irrigation schemes sustainability gaps.

Description: This meta-data on development and management of community managed small-scale irrigation schemes in Ethiopia is presented in a spreadsheet as a table after reviewing 83 published articles. The dataset contains research focus, data collection and analysis method, spatial scale, irrigation typology, irrigation water sources, source of energy for water conveyance from the source, main research results, scheme management systems, identified problems and provided solutions from each research article when available. The spatial scale was categorized as national, regional, district, basin, watershed or scheme, based on the spatial coverage of the research done. The irrigation typology was categorized as large-scale, medium-scale and small-scale based on the Ethiopian classification. Surface water sources such as river, lake, reservoir and flash flood and ground water sources of wells and springs or a combination of more than one source were mentioned as the water sources for irrigation schemes. The sources of energy for water abstraction were categorized as gravity, pump or a combination of both. Year of irrigation scheme commencement, available irrigation scheme infrastructure, number of beneficiaries (households), and stakeholders in scheme management were also extracted when available in the literature. Spatial coverage: Data was collected from community managed small-scale irrigation schemes located in different parts of Ethiopia. Location of some irrigation schemes (in UTM) is indicated in the dataset spreadsheet.