Phil Woodhouse is Professor of Environment and Development at the Global Development Institute, at The University of Manchester. He was the lead researcher on the Studying African Farmer-Led Irrigation project.
After training as an agricultural scientist at Oxford and Reading, Phil worked in Mozambique for eight years for the National Agronomy Research Institute and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. After returning to the UK he was first based at the Open University and subsequently at Manchester. He has undertaken research in a number of countries in Francophone West Africa, southern Africa, and East Africa.
Video transcript:
Welcome to our introductory course on farmer led development of irrigation.
Early in my career when I was working as a soil scientist in tropical Africa, it became very clear to me that water management was central to any improvement of soil productivity, not least because the variability of rainfall – both from year to year and across the course of any given rainy season.
And so for a number of years I’ve been undertaking research on how farmers – small scale farmers – in Africa are adapting their land and water management both technologically, socially and economically, to deal with changing agricultural circumstances.
A long running theme in this work is the extent to which when you observe what farmers are doing in the field, it diverges greatly from the expectations of policymakers. In particular, farmers seem to be much quicker to identify new opportunities and to respond to them than agricultural planners seem able to imagine.
So when I began to read research reports of rapidly expanding irrigation by small scale farmers in central Mozambique I was very keen to collaborate with the researchers who’d been leading this work in Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
When we got talking, we realised that this kind of thing was going on in many different places throughout sub-Saharan Africa. So together with colleagues of mine here in Manchester, with Hans Komakech in Tanzania and with Angela Manjichi in Mozambique, we formed a team to investigate this phenomenon of farmer led irrigation development in more detail and to engage policymakers in government and elsewhere in discussion of what should be the response to it.
This became a three year project which we call Studying African Farmer-Led Irrigation.
This course was conceived after we had run a couple of two week workshops in Tanzania. The workshops were oversubscribed and we wanted to find a way to share more widely at least a summary of the lessons and discussions that had taken place.
Of course this short online introductory course can only provide a summary of the many practical and policy questions which are raised by the phenomenon of farmer-led development of irrigation in Africa and we encourage you to sign up to the SAFI network which is hosted by Hans Komakech and his colleagues at WISE futures in Arusha in Tanzania.