Dealing with drought: The challenge of using water system technologies to break dryland poverty traps

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Abstract

We explore strategies among farmers in semi-arid Tanzania to cope with drought, and investigate if access to a local supplemental irrigation system (the Ndiva system) can improve coping capacity. Results show high dependency on local ecosystem services when harvests fail, and indicate that farmers commonly exhaust asset holdings during droughts. Ndiva access did not have any direct effects on coping capacity, but seemed to have some indirect effects. Drawing on our findings we discuss the complexity of escaping persistent dryland poverty, and outline the circumstances under which small-scale water system technologies, such as Ndiva irrigation, may help.

Introduction

Semi-arid and dry sub-humid sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) presents large challenges in terms of the Millennium Development Goals on eradicating poverty and hunger. It is estimated that 45–50% of the population live in extreme poverty and the level of malnutrition is high (UNDP, 2006).

The main livelihood source is small-scale rainfed farming, but yield levels in current production systems are very low (FAO/NEPAD, 2002; Diao et al., 2007). As a response to the low yielding farming, and as a way to accumulate wealth, income diversification is becoming increasingly common (Ellis, 1998). However, the livelihood security of smallholders in these regions is still intimately linked with the local agro-ecological productivity, which is largely constrained by water availability (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Although the cultivated drylands in SSA are characterized by reasonably good seasonal rainfall, the distribution is extremely unpredictable, making the capacity for coping with temporal water shortages essential for the farmers (Falkenmark and Rockström, 2004). Common strategies among smallholders to handle rainfall uncertainty include crop variety diversification, matching labor inputs to expectations of the season, livestock grazing on failed plots, asset sales for cereal purchases, food transfers and migration employment (Cooper et al., 2008). The conventional agronomic solution to crop water deficits has been the development of large-scale irrigation systems, but recent efforts have increasingly focused on smaller-scale solutions, including various supplemental irrigation systems, rainwater harvesting practices, and conservation and precision farming techniques (Falkenmark and Rockström, 2004; UNDP, 2006; Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, 2007). These technologies appear to have the potential to stabilize and increase yield levels in dryland farming systems (see e.g. Fox and Rockström, 2003; Makurira et al., 2007b), and attract a growing interest as an option for smallholders in semi-arid and dry sub-humid SSA.

In this paper we investigate strategies among small-scale farmers in semi-arid Tanzania to cope with drought, focusing on how they mobilize resources at field- and landscape scales to handle drought-induced yield losses. We also investigate if access to a local small-scale supplemental irrigation system (the Ndiva system) can improve coping capacity. We discuss our findings in relation to some interesting aspects of the local poverty dynamics, and conclude the paper by exploring the potential for farming households to escape persistent poverty by increased adoption of small-scale water system technologies such as Ndiva irrigation. The paper is based on a case study from the Makanya catchment that was carried out in 2005–2006.

Section snippets

Poverty dynamics

The persistent nature of poverty in the rural drylands of SSA is the result of a general marginalization of these areas, manifested by a lack of infrastructure, public services and market access, and by human capability deprivations, in combination with a highly challenging hydro-climate (Hulme and Shepherd, 2003; Mortimore, 2005). It is believed that strategies for wealth accumulation depend on a combination of initial asset holdings (also in terms of capabilities) and the risks that people

Site description

The Makanya catchment is situated in the South Pare Mountains, Same District, Kilimanjaro region, Tanzania (Fig. 2). It covers 320 km2 and has a population of about 35,000 people. The main livelihood source is small-scale farming, often practiced in combination with livestock keeping. Farmers grow maize for subsistence, with harvests around 1.1 ton/ha,1

Local consequences of the two consecutive drought seasons

The interviews showed that food security was a major concern in the study area already during the early stages of Vuli 2005/2006, as a consequence of the reduced harvest from the preceding Masika season. At the end of the Vuli season only 8 households (N=54) had any crops at all to harvest, and more than 75% of the interviewed households stated that they experienced food shortage at that time. The level of shortage varied from having to change the diets, to reducing the amount of food per meal

Discussion

Three main issues stand out from the results. First among these is the reliance on local ecosystem services for income during crop failures; second is the extent to which resources are drained from the system during droughts; and third is the lack of direct impact of Ndiva access on drought coping capacity. The implications of these issues are analyzed below. We finish the paper with a discussion about the complexity of escaping persistent dryland poverty, outlining the circumstances under

Conclusions

The two consecutive drought seasons had major effects on people's livelihoods in the case study area. Our results clearly illustrate the farmers’ dependence on ecosystem services from the surrounding landscape when harvests fail, highlighting the need to ensure that investments made to increase the productivity at field scale do not have negative impacts on these other ecosystem services. Our findings also indicate that households frequently deplete their asset holdings during droughts, and

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Maria Tengö, Jennie Barron, Siza Tumbo, Garry Peterson, Patrick Fox, Mats Widgren, Maricela de la Torre-Castro, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this paper. The work reported here was undertaken within the Smallholder System Innovations in Integrated Watershed Management (SSI) Program supported by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida),

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