The Future of Smallholder Farming in Eastern Africa - Uganda ...

agriculturalists, who still do not have access to the inputs necessary to make the technology
succeed.
All across Africa, the rural poor depend more on agriculture than the rural non-poor, and derive
more of their income from common property than the non-poor (Scherr 1999b). Because the rural
poor have limited access to external or industrial agricultural inputs, “natural capital”—the
inherent productivity of their natural resource base, including soils, forests, and water—is of
particular importance to their livelihood security. The term “ecological poverty” has recently
come into use to describe the type of widespread poverty that arises from degradation or loss of
such natural capital (Coward et al. 1999). But ecological poverty both leads to poverty and
results from it. When poor people have trouble finding food because of insufficient agricultural
production or income, they may become even more dependent on gleaning the products of wild
biodiversity, clearing new fields from natural habitat, and poaching and encroaching on protected
areas. Such measures may provide emergency relief, but they are not sustainable and may result
in significant long-term costs.
While most of Africa’s subsistence farmers are trapped in poverty, the success of those few
smallholders who have spontaneously adopted irrigation technologies has been largely
overlooked. Irrigation planners focus on formal irrigation schemes, without acknowledging the
existence of the millions of resource-poor farmers who laboriously carry buckets of water to their
fields. These bucket farmers, however, have demonstrated that it is possible to cultivate highvalue
crops on small plots, and sell them in urban marketplaces. With irrigation devices that are
both affordable and appropriate to their scale of investment, hundreds of thousands of these
farmers have demonstrated that they can vastly improve on their current circumstances, and
gradually reinvest their profits to climb out of poverty.
Over the past 20 years, mounting evidence has shown that access to affordable small-plot
irrigation technology for small farmers increases their productivity and income -- providing a
powerful poverty alleviation strategy. Over this period, almost a million and a half treadle
pumps have been purchased and installed by smallholders in Bangladesh. Costing about $25
each and purchased from local private-sector enterprises, the treadle pumps are helping farmers
to generate $130 million dollars a year in new net income (IDE 2002). Since the original program
in Bangladesh began 15 years ago, similar private sector based programs have expanded to India,
Nepal, Cambodia, and Zambia. Other programs have spread to Mali and Burkina Faso, with the
help of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Enterprise Works Worldwide. ApproTEC, a
Kenyan-based NGO, has achieved annual sales of more than 6,000 pumps in Kenya,
demonstrating that volume sales are possible in Sub-Saharan Africa. (ApproTEC Annual
Report).
In the last five years, a second generation of affordable small-plot irrigation technologies has
emerged in the form of low-cost sprinkler and drip irrigation systems. More than 25,000 low-cost
drip systems have been purchased and installed by small farmers in India, Nepal, China, Sri
Lanka, and Kenya (IDE, 2002).
The water resources of Sub-Saharan Africa comprise a major unutilized resource for the region.
Only limited developments have occurred along the major rivers. Just an estimated seven
percent of the potential irrigable area of the continent has been developed to date and irrigated
acreage has been increasing at only an estimated 1 per cent per year. In Kenya, however, where
ApproTEC is now selling more than 6,000 pumps per year the resulting expansion of small scale
irrigation has resulted in a five percent per annum growth in irrigated area without any major