Policy Note: Expanding Irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Policymakers in Sub-Saharan Africa have placed considerable emphasis on expanding irrigated agriculture. This is in response to the subcontinent’s growing population pressure, coupled with production risks associated with declining and variable rainfall. Irrigation is viewed as an important strategy to improve food security and protect rural livelihoods, with small-scale irrigation identified as the preferred strategy. And yet, adoption of irrigation has been slow, and irrigation investments are often underutilized. Expanding irrigated agriculture through increases in cultivated area alone will not be sufficient for greater food security; land and water productivity of irrigated agriculture needs to be increased, and this may in fact help accelerate the adoption of irrigation. Shared irrigation investments among small farmers are going to be challenging to sustain as smallholder households diversify their livelihoods, and do not cultivate field crops every season. For individual irrigation technologies, many barriers exist in their adoption, especially the risks and ambiguities such as pestilence and borehole installation failures; and governments will have to invest significantly more than they currently do in research and extension efforts to ease these barriers. Finally, the expansion of irrigation, especially individual irrigation, will likely create environmental challenges such as aquifer depletion, water pollution, and soil degradation, which governments would also have to manage by coordinating the actions of individual smallholders. This paper identifies the kind of institutional infrastructure and policy support that African agriculture will need to have in place to expand irrigation beyond its current status.