Big irrigation projects failed to deliver – what’s needed next

IN 1938, French colonial authorities in what is today Mali started an ambitious infrastructure plan to transform the desert into an area of agricultural production. Water was diverted from the Niger River through a canal system to enable irrigation on more than a million hectares of fertile land.

The project is one of the largest irrigation schemes in Africa. The Malian project, known as “Office Du Niger”, has had a profound influence on agricultural water management and planning across Africa. By the 1960s, African governments saw it as a model for rural development.

With World Bank funding, hundreds of dams and large irrigation schemes were set up across Africa. The intended goals were increasing food security, reducing poverty and stimulating economic growth. Unfortunately, the reality of many of the irrigation projects has been different.

Since 2008, governments across Africa have announced plans for a new era of irrigation scheme development. Yet, it is unclear why earlier schemes fell so short of expectations.

To answer the question, we evaluated 79 schemes across sub-saharan Africa between the 1940s and 2010.

Our findings show that the irrigation schemes deliver, on average, only 18% of the irrigated production area originally proposed. And many schemes are inactive, some only a few years after construction.

Irrigation project failures have been blamed on several factors, including scheme size and climate, the argument being that larger schemes that experience more variable climates fail more often. This was largely not the case in our analysis. We found the main causes of failure to be political and management frameworks underpinning irrigation project development.

Firstly, for governments, a key motivation for scheme development was to produce more food. This would reduce dependence on imports while generating exports. But the resulting focus on the production of low-value staple crops, such as rice and maize, led to poor financial performance.

Low-value crops undermine the financial sustainability of capital-intensive irrigation projects in the long term because the crops don’t always generate reliable and substantial profits. And that makes it harder for farmers to contribute to the maintenance and upkeep of infrastructure.

The result is a cycle of dependence on external investment and subsidies. Once the initial investment runs out, manseycsocnhd el my, ed so d ne to err si oh ra at veer atepnidd le yd.

to prefer large, centrally managed infrastructure projects. They seem to be less complex technically and logistically than a multiplicity of smaller scale initiatives. However, many centralised government agencies in sub-saharan Africa are underfunded and poorly resourced. Many lack the technical and institutional capacity needed to manage such large-scale projects.

Without changes to the way projects are envisaged, implemented and managed, African governments risk repeating the mistakes of 20th century development. This could have damaging consequences for poverty, food security and economic development.

Small-scale farmers have for centuries been developing a wide range of irrigation systems independent of development agencies or governments.

These investments may be several orders of magnitude cheaper than large schemes and may offer better returns in terms of farmer incomes and rural livelihoods.

New approaches on how irrigation development is financed and implemented in Africa are called for. There’s a need to combine large and small-scale approaches to irrigation development to meet the twin goals of improving food and water security.