The PROIRRI project, funded by the World Bank in Mozambique, is a case study of a recent effort to incorporate a social-economic irrigation design approach.
The PROIRRI approach identified key elements:
- infrastructure development
- water management
- production support
- value chain development and
- financial services
PROIRRI was based on the assumption that for a sustainable irrigation development project to succeed, all these elements had to work together.
The project envisaged that many of the social and organisation aspects would be addressed before the technical design of the irrigation was finalised, enabling the operational implications of different designs to be discussed and evaluated as part of the design process. At the end of that process a final design would be made and agreed on by farmers already organised as an irrigation association and/or production groups.
But what happened in reality was different. The social elements of the PROIRRI model became separated from the infrastructure elements and the two progressed independently, with infrastructure choices not taking social structures into account.
The result is that the PROIRRI has repeated the mistakes of post-colonial irrigation development by pushing for infrastructural development without taking the social-economic aspect into consideration within the physical design.
Continuation of the PROIRRI project under the name of IRRIGA sought not to develop more new irrigation infrastructure, but to ‘explain to farmers how to use the irrigation systems’ constructed during the earlier PROIRRI phase.
The concern is that this project could become another example of the assumption that farmers should be taught and shown how to farm, according to the perception of ’modern’ agriculture and technocratic irrigation engineers’ views. It also assumes that farmers will take on the responsibility of operating and managing imposed irrigation systems.