Productivity of irrigation technologies in the White Volta basin

Parts of the White Volta basin in northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso have witnessed a spectacular rise of irrigated agriculture since about 2000, largely without government support, and seems to have been triggered by a strong and growing demand for vegetables, notably tomatoes in the urban centres of southern Ghana. It is interesting to note the variety of different irrigation technologies that individual and groups of smallholder farmers adopted, adapted and implemented. Some technologies are well-known, such as those associated with conventional sources of water like small and large reservoirs; others have been rarely described in literature, such as temporal shallow wells and alluvial dugouts.This paper describes and characterises these different irrigation technologies and conducts a comparative analysis of their productivities, in terms of crop yield, water use and financial returns. The study was conducted in three neighbouring and transboundary watersheds (Anayari, Atankwidi and Yarigatanga) located in the Upper East Region of Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. For the study, 90 tomato farmers with different irrigation technologies were surveyed during one crop season (2007/2008).The results show that adequate fertilizer application is the major contributor to irrigation productivity. Technologies characterised by relatively small farm sizes are better managed by the surveyed farmers because they are able to provide adequate water and crop nutrients thus resulting in higher productivity, and high profit margins.Apart from technologies that depend on reservoirs, all other technologies surveyed in the paper are farmer driven and required no government support. This ongoing type of endogenous irrigation development provides a strong backing that the way forward in sub-Saharan Africa is for governments to create policies that facilitate poor farmers becoming irrigation entrepreneurs. Such policies should aim to enhance the reliability of markets (both input and output) as the driving force, and facilitate people’s access to land and water.