Water monitoring and feedback for effective management of irrigation
Water monitoring and feedback for effective                The first year of high-frequency monitoring data
management of irrigation                                   revealed that the water issue went beyond poor
                                                           accessibility    to   irrigation    equipment       and
DIME worked with the World Bank Financed PROIRRI           infrastructure. These points also showed that there is
project team to tackle the water scarcity challenges in    enough water in the scheme to meet everyone’s
Mozambique by promoting sustainable irrigation and         requirements, but at plot level there’s scarcity . In all
drainage practices for smallholder farmers. The goal       but the rainiest weeks, many farmers were not being
was to double the total irrigated land by 2019.            allocated enough water to meet recommendations for
                                                           their crops. This comparison displayed that water
With only 8% of all farmers in the country having          scarcity in these schemes is purely an allocation
access to irrigation (FAO, 2016), the government of        problem.
Mozambique acknowledged that actions needed to
take place to see improvements in their agriculture        If allocations could be more precisely matched to
growth and rural development. To drive this goal           actual crop water requirements given their growth
forward, PROIRRI supported the rehabilitation and          stages, all water scarcity in the scheme could be
development of at least 3,000 Ha of irrigated farmland     eliminated without making any other changes to
across 42 schemes in three central regions of the          cultivation practices.
country: Manica, Sofala and Zambézia provinces.
                                                           As a next step, DIME went on to test whether simple
To assess how effectively farmers with irrigation          reminders could improve allocations or whether
access were managing their water, DIME’s technical         expensive metering was needed. The IE examined the
partners from Hydrosolutions, Ltd created a user-          relative value of giving some farmers detailed
based water use monitoring system. This system was         feedback comparing their actual use with the
established in three irrigation schemes, covering 148      recommendations against giving others only simple
households engaged in cultivating 222 plots that are       general reminders about typical crop needs. In the
part of these schemes.                                     end, the low-cost general reminders were just as
Figure 1 below shows what the data looked like at a        effective as the expensive individual feedback in
scheme level. Plots in blue had more than the typical      reducing the share of farmers with insufficient water.
amount of water and plots in red received less water.
The ability to assign water use data to individual plots   This feedback experiment was scaled up to the rest of
in this way uncovered the allocations throughout the       the farmers on the 3,000 Ha of land where irrigation
scheme to understand where scarcity arose.                 was rehabilitated by PROIRRI to test if the information
                                                           could be effectively delivered by SMS messages.
Figure 1

                                                           The results proved to be an example of how effective
                                                           monitoring can create a foundation for cost-effective
                                                           extension for better management. Furthermore,
                                                           assuming all irrigated areas are like the PROIRRI
                                                           project, potential savings would represent 9.4% of
                                                           water withdrawal from all sources in Mozambique.


                                                           Contact:
                                                           •   DIME: Paul J. Christian pchristian@worldbank.org,
                                                               Florence Kondylis fkondylis@worldbank.org and Astrid
                                                               Zwager (azwager@worldbank.org)