AGENDA 2063 - CAADP Report: Significant advances in Africa's irrigation and water management
Biennial Review Report is a powerful advocacy tool at the continental level, regional, and national levels, triggering necessary policy actions for agricultural transformation in Africa by 2025.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Planet Defence) - The biennial review report of the continent's Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme reveals that the low productivity of the agricultural sector is due to the limited use of factors that enhance productivity, writes Jose Fucato in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The Biennial Review Report serves as a powerful advocacy tool at the continental, regional, and national levels, triggering necessary policy actions for agricultural transformation in Africa by 2025. It is not just a reporting exercise for the Heads of State and Government Summit but also a learning exercise for countries to use the report's findings to adjust their National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIP) to achieve better results, improve livelihoods, and create shared prosperity through agricultural transformation.
The report recommends the development of irrigation and agricultural water management across the continent. It emphasizes the need to enhance irrigation technology to reach 100 percent of the irrigated arable crops area by 2025, aiming to eradicate hunger.
"The overall objective is to increase land productivity, stabilize income and consumption, and promote resilient livelihoods in the context of climate-related shocks, due to the high dependence on rainfed agriculture," the report states. This report serves as a monitoring tool for the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).
The report highlights that doubling productivity and creating a resilient food system on the continent intrinsically depend on greater use of irrigation and other solutions for managing agricultural water resources, considering the unpredictability of rainfall in terms of duration and intensity due to climate change.
Continental data grouped in the report shows that over the 8-year period from 2015 to 2023, the irrigated area increased from 9.7 million hectares to 12.4 million hectares, with an annual average growth of 3.9%, based on the specific performance of the Member States.
Fifteen member states did not report data on this indicator. However, among those that did, some encouraging trends were noted, with nine countries on track, achieving the expected score of 9.5 for the fourth reference indicator. These countries include Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Mozambique, Niger, and Sierra Leone.
Additionally, eleven other countries, although not on track, have shown consistent progress in increasing their total irrigated farmland. These countries—Rwanda, Togo, Egypt, Botswana, Liberia, Tanzania, Malawi, Angola, Mauritania, Namibia, and Burundi—scored more than 50 percent of the expected reference value for the fourth biennial review report, which is necessary to achieve the Malabo objective of a 100 percent increase by 2025.
African experts and analysts have been monitoring the performance of member states in terms of access to irrigation technology, particularly the growth rate of the irrigated area from the 2015 reference value. The irrigated area is defined as functionally irrigated or equipped for irrigation, although technical and methodological challenges associated with measuring and estimating the total area often result in gross underestimates by member states.
Despite these challenges, there have been improvements across the continent. North Africa continues to have the largest irrigated cultivated area (4.8 million hectares), while the Central Africa region has around 71,464 hectares of irrigated cultivated area. During the review period (2015-2022), the West African region was the only area that experienced a reduction in irrigated cultivated area, which may be due to the failures and underutilization of many large irrigation systems.