What is the irrigation potential for Africa? A combined biophysical and socioeconomic approach

By Liangzhi You, C. Ringler, Ulrike Wood-Sichra, R. Robertson, S. Wood, Ting Zhu, G. Nelson, Zhe Guo, Yan Sun. 2011

420 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although irrigation in Africa has the potential to boost agricultural productivities by at least 50%, food production on the continent is almost entirely rainfed. The area equipped for irrigation, currently slightly more than 13 million hectares, makes up just 6% of the total cultivated area. More than 70% of Africa’s poor live in rural areas and mostly depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. As a result, agricultural development is key to ending poverty on the continent. Many development organizations have recently proposed to significantly increase investments in irrigation in the region. However, the potential for irrigation investments in Africa is highly dependent upon geographic, hydrologic, agronomic, and economic factors that need to be taken into account when assessing the long-term viability and sustainability of planned projects. This paper analyzes the large, dam-based and small-scale irrigation investment potential in Africa based on agronomic, hydrologic, and economic factors. We find significant profitable irrigation potential for both small-scale and large-scale systems. This type of regional analysis can guide distribution of investment funds across countries and should be a first step prior to in-depth country- and local-level assessment of irrigation potential, which will be important to agricultural and economic development in Africa.

Subfields: Ocean Engineering, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9767a61ae4c39aa5028a47a89c5a389ed608f9a9

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Citations in the corpus

African farmer-led irrigation development: re-framing agricultural policy and investment? (2017, background): “Recent studies have focused on the scope and constraints for irrigation development in SSA (Inocencio et al. 2007; You et al. 2011; Fujiie et al. 2011; Xie et al. 2014) feeding the policy debate around the type of investment that would be the most desirable and appropriate to the SSA context…”
Understanding the agricultural input landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa : recent plot, household, and community-level evidence (2014, positive): “This is in spite of claims that a huge potential exists (You et al. 2011; Pavelic et al. 2013).”
Adaptation to land constraints: Is Africa different? (2014, background): “Given the exhaustion of cultivable land in many densely populated African countries, as well as their limited potential for irrigation (You et al. 2012), it is highly unlikely that Africa can reach the cropping intensities observed in many Asian countries.”
Can sub-Saharan Africa feed itself? (2016, background): “Note, for instance, the large ranges in estimated potentials for increasing irrigated areas (39, 40).”
Review: Taking stock of Africa’s second-generation agricultural input subsidy programs (2018, background): “That said, projected increases in irrigation in SSA over the next several decades are negligible: even optimistically, less than 10% of SSA’s land will be irrigated by 2060 (You et al., 2012).”
Impacts of rural electrification revisited – the African context (2016, neutral): “In particular, in India, electrification led to improved use of irrigation through electric pumps (see, for example, Barnes and Binswanger 1986).13 So far, this potential is untapped in Africa, where irrigation generally is hardly employed at all (see You et al. 2011).”
Resources, Policies, and Agricultural Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (2013, background): “Our estimates of the productivity impact of irrigation in SSA are considerably lower than a recent simulation by You et al. (2011), who assumed substantial input intensification would take place on irrigated areas.”
Adoption of Small-Scale Irrigation Farming as a Climate-Smart Agriculture Practice and Its Influence on Household Income in the Chinyanja Triangle, Southern Africa (2018, background): “Small-scale irrigation is possibly a viable climate-smart agriculture technology to consider in SSA given that the continent has abundant freshwater resources from various lakes and river basins [10] even though their distribution is not even across agro-ecological zones.”