Improved Agricultural Water Management for Africa’s Drylands

Ward, Christopher ; Torquebiau, Raphael ; Xie, Hua

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: WATER;    IRRIGATION;    AGRICULTURE;    AGRICULTURAL WATER MANAGEMENT;    WATER CONSERVATION;   

RP-ID  :  108022

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Dryland regions in Sub-Saharan Africa are home to one-half of the region’s population andthree-quarters of its poor. Poor both in natural resources and in assets and income, theinhabitants of drylands are highly vulnerable to droughts and other shocks. Despite a long historyof interventions by governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations, there havebeen no sustained large-scale successes toward improving the resilience of drylands dwellers.Improved Agricultural Water Management for Africa’s Drylands describes the extent to whichagricultural water management interventions in dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa can enhancethe resilience and improve the well-being of the people living in those regions, proposes what canrealistically be done to promote improved agricultural water management, and sets out howstakeholders can make those improvements. After reviewing the current status of irrigation andagricultural water management in the drylands, the authors discuss technical, economic, andinstitutional challenges to expanding irrigation. A model developed at the International Food PolicyResearch Institute is used to project the potential for irrigation development in the Sahel Region andthe Horn of Africa. The modeling results show that irrigation development in the drylands canreduce vulnerability and improve the resilience of hundreds of thousands of farming households,but rainfed agriculture will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, many soiland water conservation practices that can improve the productivity and ensure the sustainability ofrainfed cropping systems are available.The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the potentially highly benefi cial role of water andwater management in drylands agriculture in association with agronomic improvements, marketgrowth, and infrastructure development, and to assess the technological and socioeconomicconditions and institutional policy frameworks that can remove barriers to adoption and allowwide-scale take-up of improved agricultural water management in the dryland regions ofSub-Saharan Africa.