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 Nearly 70% of the global freshwater is withdrawn for irrigation, and fertiliser runoff causes 78% of global freshwater eutrophication (Ritchie and Roser, 2020) .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