According to the report, Water for wealth and food security: Supporting farmer-driven investments in agricultural water management, expanding the use of smallholder water management techniques could increase yields up to 300 per cent in some cases, and add tens of billions of US dollars to household revenues across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
"We've witnessed again and again what happens to the world's poor-the majority of whom depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and already suffer from water scarcity-when they are at the mercy of our fragile global food system," said Dr Colin Chartres, director-general of IWMI. "However, farmers across the developing world are increasingly relying on and benefitting from small-scale, locally-relevant water solutions."
The assessment quantified the potential reach and possible additional household revenue for a number of different on-farm and local community water solutions. This is detailed in the table below:
The three-year AgWater Solutions Research Initiative unearthed for the first time the scale at which enterprising smallholder farmers themselves are driving this revolution by using their own resources innovatively rather than waiting for water to be delivered.
"We were amazed at the scale of what is going on," said IWMI's Meredith Giordano, who coordinated the initiative. "Despite constraints, such as high upfront costs and poorly developed supply chains, small-scale farmers across Africa and Asia have moved ahead using their own resources to finance and install irrigation technologies. It's clear that farmers themselves are driving this trend."
In Ghana, for instance, small private irrigation schemes already employ 45 times more individuals and cover 25 times more land than public irrigation schemes. The majority of farmers, who said they presently use buckets or rely on rain-fed cultivation, expressed the strong desire to buy a motorised pump, but lacked resources, knowledge or access to suppliers to do so.
Partners in the AgWater collaboration believe the implications of the work could be profound, especially for donors and private investors committed to boosting incomes and livelihoods in the world's poorest countries by improving farmer access to water resources.
The research-a collaborative effort involving several international and national partners and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-provides the best evidence to-date on the scale and potential economic benefits of smallholder water management in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Water is a major constraint on food production for millions of smallholder farmers. While water resources are often sufficient, farmers lack the means to harvest it, which limits crop production to the rainy season and diminishes income opportunities.
Of sub-Saharan Africa's abundant renewable water resources, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that only 3 per cent are withdrawn for agriculture. Approximately 4 per cent of arable land is equipped for irrigation, of which less than 6 per cent is serviced by groundwater.
Experts believe that improving water management capabilities could unleash smallholder farming and it could become a major driver of economic growth, poverty reduction and food security.
