Knowledge

IFAD is currently engaged in over 230 loan operations in 85 countries. About two thirds of that portfolio is related to community-based natural resource management.

Poor rural people and their institutions are at the core of this approach. Water is critical to these men and women pastoralists, fishers, farmers, young and old, part- or full-time, urban or rural, indigenous, tribal or otherwise often marginalized people. It is the key entry point for improving their livelihoods.

Climate change represents an additional challenge to rural people in SSA – and a further reason for investment in water control. Smallholder farmers, pastoralists and artisanal fishers are among the most vulnerable to this threat. 

While projections of changes in annual rainfall vary across Africa, these groups will experience the negative effects of increased temperature and
extreme events. For them, enhanced control of water will become critical in building resilience to increased climate variability.

Women constitute two-thirds of the 1.2 billion poor people in the world. The great majority live in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, regions that are also home to most of the world’s ‘water poor’ – those with limited access to reliable, safe supplies of water for productive and domestic uses. The role women play in reducing food insecurity and poverty – through their knowledge of multiple uses of water, crop production, local biodiversity, soils and local water resources – is recognized internationally. However, despite this, they are often still excluded from decision-making processes in new water management approaches and other natural resource allocation projects and initiatives. Globalization, changing market dynamics and climate change are altering the rural context for most poor rural people, resulting in increased vulnerability to natural hazards and economic uncertainties, above all for women. 

Large, well-constructed ‘agro-wells’ are making farming profitable for farmers living in dry areas of Sri Lanka. Farmers in the dry areas of the district of Matale benefited from the Regional Economic Advancement Project (REAP) from 1999 to 2007.

REAP was mostly funded by a loan of US$11.7 million from IFAD to the Government of Sri Lanka. The project had a total budget of US$14.5 million,
and benefited some 30,000 households.

A major activity of REAP’s subcomponent on soil conservation and water management was assistance to the poorest farmers to enable them to
construct agro-wells for irrigation purposes. This activity was started in 2001.

Le potentiel irrigable du Haut Bassin du Mandrare est connu depuis très longtemps. 

La zone du Haut Bassin du Mandrare divisée en six sous-bassins versants qui alimentent le Mandrare bénéficie d’une bonne pluviométrie (normalement comprise entre 800 et 1100 mm) par rapport aux autres zones de l’extrême Sud de Madagascar. 

Les sols des vallées sont fertiles et se prêtent à la riziculture irriguée, activité agricole pratiquée par 60 % des habitants de la zone. 

Secure access by rural poor people to both land and water is central to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the target of reducing by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

Most of these people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

However, international debate continues to address land and water issues separately, and to view the significant use of water in agriculture as problematic.