The SAFI project developed the following recommendations with policy makers to help them work with farmers implementing their own irrigation initiatives.
Make farmer-led irrigation development part of economic and social security strategies
- Seek ways to reduce vulnerability and spread benefits of irrigation among different social groups;
- Facilitate access to reliable markets for inputs and produce;
- Identify and remove constraints such as transport infrastructure, taxation of key inputs and electricity supply.
Learn from existing practice and the diversity of irrigation that farmers operate, design and influence
- Analyse the dynamics and constraints of farmer led irrigation development in specific contexts;
- Manage expectations for replicability of experience from one site to another;
- Encourage opportunities for farmer-to-farmer learning.
Get more accurate data
- Evaluate alternative, and possibly complementary, methods of mapping and measuring irrigation beyond formal ‘schemes’;
- Revise irrigation statistics to enable recognition of location and extent of farmer led irrigation development;
- Identify the status and support the needs of farmer-led irrigation development.
Develop a supportive and accessible regulatory framework
- Recognise small scale irrigators as productive water users;
- Avoid onerous or costly registration procedures that stifle initiatives and dynamism;
- Review legislative and regulatory frameworks for water and agriculture to ensure they take account of farmer-led initiatives;
- Explore investment and technical strategies for intensification instead of expansion of irrigation;
- Identify how state agencies’ technical and organisational capacity needs to be improved to enable more effective engagement with farmer-led irrigation development.
Key messages:
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Suggested further reading:
- Modernisation and African Farmer-led Irrigation Development.
- Re-introducing Politics in African Farmer-Led Irrigation Development.
- Water laws and farmer led irrigation development.
- Full reference list
Acknowledgements
- Phil Woodhouse, Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester