Innovations to Promote Growth among Small-scale Irrigators in Africa: An Ethnographic and Knowledge-Exchange Approach

If policy-makers are to foster growth in most developing countries today, where economies remain heavily focused on agriculture, they must choose which of two ongoing trends to support. The choice is especially clear in sub-Saharan Africa, where suitable land and water for cultivation are scarce and where climate change is underway, compounding the shortages caused by population expansion. They can endorse the neocolonial trend of allowing foreign corporations to acquire the best land and water in order to work large holdings entirely for export. Or they can nurture the capacity of small farmers and irrigators in existing communities to grow crops for household subsistence while also producing a surplus, or even other special cash crops, for sale in domestic and international markets. The proposed research would attempt to do the latter by encouraging innovation, in a novel effort to enhance local food security while increasing cash incomes and fostering market growth. The aim is to increase the capacity of households and communities to produce for both purposes while also adapting to climate change, by promoting technologies that improve the efficiency with which basic resources are utilized, particularly water. These technologies-including both 'hard' and 'soft' types, new ones as well as old-have been adopted by farmers in certain parts of Tanzania, Malawi, and Bangladesh, in dynamic irrigation communities that would be sites of the proposed research. The study would first explore these local adaptations ethnographically in three selected villages, and then sponsor a programme of reciprocal knowledge exchange between their water-user groups. By means of the latter, the project would seek to expand the options available to the farmers residing in each place, thereby influencing--in ways that cannot be predicted but can be carefully observed--the direction and pace of change. Of great value in its own right, as a comparative study of adaptations to emerging rural markets and to climate change, the research would also break new ground in the field of participatory development.

The results of the proposed research will potentially benefit many people, both within academia and outside it, but perhaps no one more than policy-makers who are concerned with economic growth. It will be of special interest to others having a particular interest in the contribution that irrigation-and irrigation improvement-can potentially make to that process.

The results of the research, including profiles of the irrigation systems and a discussion of the other economic innovations mentioned in the Case for Support, will be presented in the following outputs, which will be disseminated as widely and rapidly as possible through several channels:

1. preliminary and final reports on each of the three cases studied, as required by the ESRC and DfID;
2. one version of the students' individual case studies, each of which will be turned into an article for publication, hopefully in a special issue of a major scholarly journal.
2. a second version to take the form of a chapter for an edited book volume presenting all of the project's final results (to be edited by the PI), which may be prepared during the last year of the research (assuming that a publishing contract can be arranged);
3. papers to be given by each member of the field research team (including the PI) at annual professional meetings and other academic forums;
4. ethnographic profiles of the three studied communities, to be presented on the project web page;
5. presentations given by members of the research team at a one-day conference, at Cranfield University, where the results of the research will be disseminated publicly.

Two principal channels will be used to ensure that most of these outputs are disseminated rapidly, and have the broadest possible impact, among agencies and NGO's working in the irrigation sector, both in the UK and abroad. The first will be an informal electronic collaboration with four key global organizations which have expressed interest in the project: the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka (IWMI), the FAO in Rome, the International Conference on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) in the UK, and the International Network on Participatory Irrigation Management (INPIM), now headquartered in Pakistan. As soon as the project reports become available, they will be posted on the project web page and sent electronically to these organizations (with the ESRC's permission), for dissemination as working papers to their regional offices, and to their staff and to their wider membership, including participating NGO's. These will essentially be offered as a form of common intellectual property, for general use in development. Other opportunities to do the same with other organizations will be taken advantage of as they become available, such as the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP). Seminar presentations will hopefully also be made at DfID and ESRC-sponsored events in the UK, or perhaps at the Overseas Development Institute.

The second channel will be a one-day Dissemination Workshop, to be held at Cranfield University toward the end of the last year of the project. A senior delegate of the main irrigation development agency of each of the three countries included in the study-Tanzania, Malawi and Bangladesh--will be invited, probably a person from that country's embassy in each case, along with 3 irrigation experts from major research institutions in the UK. This event, along with the other outputs and activities described above, should ensure that the results of the project are disseminated as widely as possible, and that the research has the broadest possible impact.