Water and Food in Africa

Smallholder farmers make up close to 70% of agricultural production in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Most of the crops on these lands are rain-fed, hence their production is highly susceptible to variabilities in rainfall ( Koigi, 2022 ). As such, there is a huge potential to boost agricultural productivity through irrigation. For instance, farmers who are able to produce during dry seasons tend to earn substantially more (Jayne et al. 2016) . Construction plans are already underway to build new and expand existing irrigation systems, such as the Shire Valley Transformation Programme in Malawi and the Bura and Mwea in Kenya ( Merrey, 2020 ). These large-scale programmes are well-funded by institutions like the World Bank. However, is larger necessarily better? The Office du Niger Tragedy In 1932, the French colonisers established a canal irrigation system at the Niger River in Mali to scale up the cotton supply for their booming textile industry. Known as ‘Office du Niger’, it is one of t...

My interest in water and food started when I was building a Global Youth Development Agenda on Water as a part of an initiative for the World Meteorological Organisation. While this experience increased my awareness of the complexity of water governance, I observed that food and water issues are often treated in isolation in governmental agendas, despite their inherent connection. Nearly 70% of the global freshwater is withdrawn for irrigation, and fertiliser runoff causes 78% of global freshwater eutrophication (Ritchie and Roser, 2020) .  COP27 will be hosted in Africa, a continent with the lowest per capita freshwater withdrawals and rates of food production ( Funk and Brown, 2009 ; Wada and Bierkens, 2014 ). As such, climate adaptation is at the centre of climate debates, where UN Sustainable Development Goals 2 and 6 - established to achieve ‘zero hunger’ and ‘clean water and sanitation for all' by 2030 respectively - are particularly prevalent. Hence, I wish to take a closer...