Climate change is reducing water availability and threatening food security, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In response, multilateral donors are increasingly funding farmer-led irrigation (FLID). Donors and governments see FLID as a strategy to expand irrigation coverage to improve household food insecurity and alleviate rural poverty. FLID is a process where farmers drive irrigation investments by configuring agricultural technology practices, crop-specific market linkages, land and water governance arrangements, and interactions with informal and formal value chain actor networks (Woodhouse et al., 2017; see also [1], as well as Uganda. In Ghana, IFAD, the World Bank, and USAID have funded the dissemination of irrigation equipment to smallholder farmers in commercial nucleus and out-grower schemes as a form of "medium to large-scale FLID" (Dittoh, 2020, p. 16). Concerns have been expressed about the low level of smallholder farmer participation in farmer-based organizations to the benefit of medium and large-scale irrigators (Dittoh, 2020). Water-efficient irrigation technologies (e.g., sprinklers, drip) and solar-powered irrigation pumps are increasingly funded by the Government of Rwanda, bi- and multilateral donors, and private service providers across FLID models (Nzeyimana, 2021).
The emphasis on climate-smart agriculture, including the promotion of FLID, may fall into the same contradictory predicament. Greater public and private support for farmer-led irrigation and therefore the dissemination of solar-powered irrigation pumps exists in areas where wealthier farmers already produce high-value crops (Kafle et al., 2021). Notwithstanding, donors and development partners are, at best, levelling the playing field, rather than approaching the social and economic exclusion of some farmers as an inevitable outcome of FLID (Theis et al., 2018). Bi- and multi-lateral donors and development partners' diverging stances on the conceptualization of FLID expose its shortcomings as a sustainable development strategy. This emerging approach risks reinforcing conventional modes of water governance that already favour commercially oriented and private sector companies at the expense of resource-poor smallholder farmers. Further scrutiny of project-level FLID investments is necessary to ensure that FLID is not inadvertently reinforcing conventional modes of water governance and remains, at its core, a participatory irrigation process.
Grace Harmon
References
Dittoh, S. (2020). Assessment of Farmer-Led Irrigation Development in Ghana. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/35796
Harmon, G., Jepson, W., & Lefore, N. (2023). Farmer-led irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa. WIREs Water, e1631. [1] These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank or national governments per the stated disclaimer.