Improved Agricultural Water Management for Africa’s Drylands

D
ryland regions in Sub-Saharan Africa are home to one-half of the region’s population and
three-quarters of its poor. Poor both in natural resources and in assets and income, the
inhabitants of drylands are highly vulnerable to droughts and other shocks. Despite a long history
of interventions by governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations, there have
been no sustained large-scale successes toward improving the resilience of drylands dwellers.
Improved Agricultural Water Management for Africa’s Drylands describes the extent to which
agricultural water management interventions in dryland regions of Sub-Saharan Africa can enhance
the resilience and improve the well-being of the people living in those regions, proposes what can
realistically be done to promote improved agricultural water management, and sets out how
stakeholders can make those improvements. After reviewing the current status of irrigation and
agricultural water management in the drylands, the authors discuss technical, economic, and
institutional challenges to expanding irrigation. A model developed at the International Food Policy
Research Institute is used to project the potential for irrigation development in the Sahel Region and
the Horn of Africa. The modeling results show that irrigation development in the drylands can
reduce 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 soil
and water conservation practices that can improve the productivity and ensure the sustainability of
rainfed cropping systems are available.
The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the potentially highly benefi cial role of water and
water management in drylands agriculture in association with agronomic improvements, market
growth, and infrastructure development, and to assess the technological and socioeconomic
conditions and institutional policy frameworks that can remove barriers to adoption and allow
wide-scale take-up of improved agricultural water management in the dryland regions of
Sub-Saharan Africa.