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 this Special Issue). In other words, smallholder farmers autonomously self-finance technologies and crop inputs and act as the leading agents in irrigation expansion.
Evidence of FLID as a response to the failures of large-scale irrigation schemes can be found in the very language donors and others have adopted to operationalize FLID: "individual irrigation systems" (Waalewijn et al., 2019), "farmer-driven development," (Wahlin, 2018), and "small, private irrigation" (Wichelns, 2014). But a closer investigation of the growing support for FLID reveals a paradox. The 2021 World Bank Farmer-led Irrigation Development Guide advances FLID as a sustainable development strategy to increase irrigation access for female, youth, and other asset-poor farmers (World Bank, 2021). At the same time, this strategy also is open to any farm size or landholding and small-scale, FLID investments within large-scale irrigation projects (World Bank, 2021). Farmer-led irrigation may have started as autonomous development with farmers at its centre, but donor-driven FLID projects risk taking investment decisions away from smallholder farmers, including women, and privilege relatively asset-rich, commercial producers and companies.
FLID is, ideally, farmers' response to neoliberal structural adjustment policies and the subset of policy tools, such as Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and Water User Associations (WUAs). Driven by structural adjustment and the focus on Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) in the 1970s, the roll-out of WUAs and other decentralized water management institutions created challenges, not necessarily opportunities, for local water user participation (Waalewijn et al., 2019). That said, implementation projects can also advance and be complementary to these modes of water governance established by public and donor agencies (Harmon et al., 2023). For example, the World Bank is piloting public support for farmer-led and micro-scale irrigation for 800 farmers around the command area of two new large-scale irrigation schemes in Uganda's Isingiro and Kanungu Districts (World Bank, 2020). The National Irrigation Policy and World Bank funding support the development of micro, small, medium, and large-scale irrigation schemes in parallel, though the Irrigation for Climate Resilience Project appraisal report acknowledges that farmer-led irrigation has contributed to most of the irrigation growth in Uganda (World Bank, 2020). These dynamics in implementation projects complicate and even undermine the "farmer-led" nature of FLID.
An increasing number of donor, financial, and public agencies has integrated FLID into their development strategies in the last five years. Policy milestones that further mainstreamed FLID include the 2013 Dakar Declaration, the 2018 "Kigali Declaration on Farmer-led Irrigation for Smallholder Farming Enterprises", and the 2021 World Bank Farmer-led Irrigation Development Guide (World Bank, 2021). As multilateral donors shift to conceptualizing and funding FLID as climate-smart agriculture, the increasing incorporation of solar-powered irrigation technologies and agribusiness project components has created entry points for FLID (Wahlin, 2018). Some of the project-level transaction models discussed by the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on Farmer-led Irrigation include financial support for individual farmers to integrate into value chains, but also nucleus estate and out-grower schemes or community-level irrigation schemes for commercial farmers in tight value chains (Wahlin, 2018). These policy milestones opened the mechanisms through which donors finance FLID — small-scale FLID investments alongside public irrigation schemes, corporate farms, and input supply companies. But these initiatives also reinforce the FLID policy paradox.
Private sector and multilateral donor FLID investments illustrate this policy paradox. World Bank-sponsored reports document this trend of multilateral donor investments in small-scale, FLID within medium to large-scale scheme irrigation projects in Ghana (Dittoh, 2020), Rwanda (Nzeyimana, 2021)[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. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1631
Kafle, K., Omotilewa, O., Leh, M., & Schmitter, P. (2021). Who is likely to benefit from public and private sector investments in farmer-led irrigation development? Evidence from Ethiopia. The Journal of Development Studies, 58, 55–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2021. 1939866
Nzeyimana, I. (2021). Assessment of Farmer-Led Irrigation Development in Rwanda. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/35798
Theis, S., Bekele, R. D., Lefore, N., Meinzen-Dick, R. S., & Ringler, C. (2018). Considering gender when promoting small-scale irrigation technologies: Guidance for inclusive irrigation interventions (IFPRI-REACH Project Note, Issue. IFPRI. http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/132933
Waalewijn, P., Trier, R., Denison, J., Siddiqi, Y., Vos, J., Amjad, E., & Schulte, M. (2019). Governance in irrigation and drainage: Concepts, cases, and action-oriented approaches—A practitioner's resource. World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/ 32339
Wahlin, B. (2018, January 29-30). Farmer-led irrigated agriculture: Seeds of opportunity [Conference presentation]. International Conference on Farmer-led Irrigation, Washington, DC.
Wichelns, D. (2014). Investing in small, private irrigation to increase production and enhance livelihoods. Agricultural Water Management. 131, 163-166. https://doi.org/10.1016.j.agwat.2013.09.003
Woodhouse, P., Veldwisch, G. J., Venot, J.-P., Brockington, D., Komakech, H., & Manjichi, A. (2017). African farmer-led irrigation development: re-framing agricultural policy and investment? The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(1), 213–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150. 2016.1219719
World Bank. (2020). Uganda - Irrigation for Climate Resilience Project (English) [Project Appraisal Document]. World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/860371591125380263/Uganda-Irrigation-for-Climate-Resilience-Project
World Bank Group. (2021). Farmer-led irrigation development guide — A what, why and how for intervention design. World Bank. https://blogs.worldbank.org/water/farmer-led-irrigation-what-why-and-how-guide
Photo credit: IWMI
[1] These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank or national governments per the stated disclaimer.