Accelerating Irrigation Expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa : Policy Lessons from the Global Revolution in Farmer-Led Smallholder Irrigation
Sub-Saharan Africa urgently needs to accelerate the pace of agricultural growth to improve livelihoods, ensure food security, and keep droughts from turning into famines. However, this requires the region to increase smallholder irrigation faster t...
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/479941624264066924/Accelerating-Irrigation-Expansion-in-Sub-Saharan-Africa-Policy-Lessons-from-the-Global-Revolution-in-Farmer-Led-Smallholder-Irrigation http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35804 |
| Summary: | Sub-Saharan Africa urgently needs to
accelerate the pace of agricultural growth to improve
livelihoods, ensure food security, and keep droughts from
turning into famines. However, this requires the region to
increase smallholder irrigation faster than its current
sluggish pace. In this respect, explosive growth since the
1970s in distributed farmer-led smallholder irrigation
(FLSI) in China, South Asia, and elsewhere may offer
Sub-Saharan Africa better guidance than state-led
centralized large irrigation projects. Proactive policy
support, prominence of market players, economies of scale
and scope, village-level irrigation service markets,
government incentives, and subsidies on motor pumps and
boreholes have all triggered and fueled rapid expansion of
motor pump–driven FLSI that made famines history and
countries food-secure in Asia in a short span of a decade or
two. With its ample shallow groundwater resources and sparse
farming areas, Sub-Saharan Africa has immense potential to
grow pump-driven FLSI quickly, cost-effectively, and without
risking the environmental ill effects observed in Asia and
elsewhere. A “big push” to FLSI will work better than an
incremental trickle because high-volume-low-margin FLSI
growth generates economies of scale and scope, which are
essential. Interventions by nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) are useful for demonstration and piloting
innovations, but market players are best placed to achieve
scale. Finally, Sub-Saharan Africa can and needs to leapfrog
and build its FLSI economy around solar irrigation pumps,
which are destined to disrupt FLSI globally in the years to come. |
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