Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This Policy Guide is drawn from the results of the FAO Project “Strengthening Agricultural Water Efficiency and Productivity at the African and Global Level” funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The long term vision of the project was that the
in-country findings and processes which are of common nature can be synthesized and scaled up to other countries in a regional cooperation process and globally. This will eventually lead to the increase of investment in Agricultural Water Management (AWM) in the targeted countries – and beyond – that is socially equitable, profitable at the farm level, economically viable, environmentally neutral or positive, and sustainable. The guide focuses on the specific component of enhancing water use efficiency at small scale irrigation as one of the major outputs of the project. While creating and implementing Water Use Efficiency (WUE) measures at field level, existing policy frameworks were mapped and analyzed, and recommendations were defined as scalable policy instruments with the aim to demonstrate case-specific experiences to the collectively agreed goal of using water resources efficiently.
Although the concept of adaptive water-management is not a newly introduced approach in policy-making, it has not been used frequently in practice (Bormann et al, 1993; Pahl-Wostl et al, 2008; Pahl-Wostl, 2007). This guide is built on the systematic process of adaptive management “learning to manage by managing to learn”. The guide is designed to lead the readers through the policy-making process in various conditions of the pilot countries. It presents the key steps overarching the country-specific implementation of development programme, design of combined WUE Instruments (WUEi), and formulation of policy recommendations for small-scale irrigation (SSI) by illustrating ad-hoc examples and case studies-based explanations.