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Showing posts with label water resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water resources. Show all posts

When a farmer takes the stage

Posted by Roxanna Samii Wednesday, October 2, 2013 0 comments

by Guido Rutten

 “Treat us as equal citizens – don’t forget that it’s us who feed you in the city!” 

Abdelwahab El Haddad knew what he had to do when taking the stage – he had to shake things up a little. Moments before, this water conference had looked like any other. A luxury venue, a plenary session and a crowd full of senior managers, policy makers and engineers.

When Abdelwahab speaks, the crowd looks up. The friendly Egyptian does not hold titles of academic importance. He does not have a fancy powerpoint with graphs that indicate daunting futures on water scarcity. He is a farmer, and he has a clear and simple message: your solutions won’t work without us – so you’ll have to work with us.

A few minutes later, Zahida Detho asks the farmers in the room to raise their hands. People in the front curiously turn around, their gazes meeting other eyes that scan for hands. There are no farmers. When Zahida asks the women in the room to raise their hands, the truth is already uncomfortably known to all. Zahida, a farmer from Pakistan, doesn’t need to say any more.

Somewhere in the large auditorium, a group of 14 young African high potentials in water management nervously listen to Abdelwahab and Zahida’s speech. They know that they will have to take the stage the next day, and expose another uncomfortable truth: that we have forgotten to invest in human capital.
When their moment comes, these young professionals seize the opportunity. Senior experts gather round the sheets of paper on which the youngsters have sketched their challenges. How do you prevent migrant workers from carrying out illegal, water-polluting mining activities in Burkina Faso? How can we build up long-term ownership of irrigation infrastructure amongst farmers, if donor money needs to be spent so quickly?

Initial hesitation is quickly overcome and heated debates follow, where the young professionals hurriedly take notes and collect business cards. Because this rare case of knowledge transfer between senior and junior professionals should not stop here. It should only grow bigger, before we lose a wealth of knowledge as seniors start to retire.

The people in this story are the forgotten stakeholders. During the First World Irrigation Forum in Mardin, Turkey, they took their chance to come out of the shadows. IFAD supports these forgotten stakeholders in their quest to bring the uncomfortable truths to daylight.

March 12 and 13: Reclaiming the desert

Posted by daniela cuneo Friday, March 15, 2013 0 comments

By Laura Eggens, ILEIA
The Learning Route set course for West Nubaria, an area where “the desert has been reclaimed”. Overcrowding in the fertile land of the Egypt Delta led to resettlement of a number of farmers in this so called “New Land”. Initially, infrastructure, social services and proper irrigation structures were missing in this area, making it an incredibly hard place for farmers to thrive. On March 12, ruteros learnt how an initiative in West Nubaria turned the fate of these farmers around. 
Thirty years ago, small-scale farmers, landless farmers and “graduates” (educated Egyptians with some funds to invest) started their move to the New Lands. Canals from the Nile were directed to West Nubaria, irrigating the infertile desert land. Not only were many basic services like schools and clinics missing, but the available water was not enough to irrigate the 100,000 hectares of this area. Fortunately, when the ruteros arrived in this region yesterday, the farmers’ situation was very different. What happened here to turn this inhospitable area into a success story? What did the ruteros learn?
We visited the office of the West Nubaria Rural Development Project (WNRDP), funded by the Egyptian government, the Italian cooperation and IFAD, where we were introduced to a number of initiatives in the area – not only in the field of improved water management techniques, but also in terms of community development, marketing support, credit facilitation and farmers’ organisations. We experienced the changes in the lives of two types of farmers: the “investor”-farmer Atef Hafiz, owning and innovating on his almost 100 acres of land; and small-scale farmer Ahmad El-Far with a diversity of crops on his farm of approximately 17.5 acres. The last stop at the ICARDA research station in West Nubaria showed us where farmers in the region can learn from experimentation with varying amounts of irrigation and fertilizer applied on different crops, to discover the ideal water saving combination for this type of soil.
Seeing the different aspects of this case, the ruteros paid special attention to innovations and what were critical factors for success, making these innovations possible. But they also looked at some challenges that remain, and recommendations they could make based on the experiences in their own country. In this way, the Learning Route becomes a vehicle for knowledge exchange in both ways!
The ruteros saw in the West Nubaria case the importance of farmers’ willingness to change. It was a great advantage that land was given to small-scale farmers as well as graduates and investors, educated and experienced farmers who are able to experiment and develop techniques suited for this harsh environment, with the financial and organisational backing of the WNRDP. Farmers like Atef Hafiz and Ahmad El-Far share their positive experiences with other farmers. “This farm is open for anyone to learn from,” says Atef, who also produces his own videos for others to learn from. “I had an education, but not everyone here has that. People can use my real life experience, which is specific to the New Lands water and soil situation.”
For the farmers in this region, it is a pleasure to share their success stories with the ruteros. The farmer Zineb for example, who travelled from far to meet us at the ICARDA research station, wishes we would have come to visit her farm. Her peach orchard is beautiful now, she says, despite the extremely difficult start she had in this land. Mostafa el Sayad, the director of the WNRDP, also believes that farmers appreciate the visit of the ruteros. “They will get feedback on their work, but it is also good for them to feel heard. The visit of the Learning Route convinces them that they are doing something right, something worth sharing.” It showed from their knowledgeable answers to the (sometimes critical) questions of the ruteros, that they are the experts in their own context.


Interested in learning more? Read the first blog