Increasing climate variability and challenge in access to water pose major impediments to rainfed agricultural productivity. Extensive flooding of agricultural lands during the rainy season and lack of water during the 8-month long dry season affect the livelihood of the people in the northern Ghana, a situation that calls for better water management practices. The use of aquifer storage and recharge (ASR) based technique, helps to reduce flooding and improve access to water during the dry season; however such technology has specific requirements for successful implementation.

Water management in Bangladesh is guided by an intended integrated and inclusive approach enshrined in government legislation since the late 1990s. Based on qualitative and quantitative data collected in the coastal zone, we assess the implementation of these policies with regard to women water uses. First, the analysis of reproductive and productive roles of women establishes that men have a significant role to play in domestic supply, and women use water extensively for small-scale agriculture and aquaculture, the scope of which has been underestimated.

This report summarizes the findings of a collaborative effort to map and assess irrigated areas in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. The study was conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) and the Limpopo Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (LDARD), as part of the DAFF-supported ‘Revitalization of irrigation in South Africa’ project.

This Research Report chronicles the evolution of thinking on water productivity in the research agenda of IWMI and in the broader irrigation literature over the past 20 years. It describes the origins of the concept and the methodological developments, its operationalization through applied research, and some lessons learned over the two decades of research.

A survey of 76 public smallholder irrigation schemes in the Limpopo Province was jointly conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), South Africa, and the Limpopo Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (LDARD), as part of the ‘Revitalization of Smallholder Irrigation in South Africa’ project.

Land provides a host of ecosystem services, of which the provisioning services are often considered paramount. As the demand for agricultural products multiplies, other ecosystem services are being degraded or lost entirely. Finding a sustainable trade-off between food production and one or more of other ecosystem services, given the variety of stakeholders, is a matter of optimizing land use in a dynamic and complex socio-ecological system. Land degradation reduces our options to meet both food demands and environmental needs.

Avoiding the negative effects of intensive groundwater resource use is challenging, especially when the interactions and causal pathways between biophysical and socioeconomic processes are complex, and when users, management, and regulatory bodies are spatially dispersed. The plain of Haouaria, in north-eastern Tunisia, has witnessed an important development of groundwater abstraction, fueled by the multiplication of wells tapping the underlying shallow and deep aquifers.

The overall measure of farm-level technical efficiency is generally used to derive recommendations for the use of individual inputs. In this paper, joint estimation is made of technical and individual input-use (e.g. irrigation water productivity) efficiencies. This indicates that overall technical efficiency is not an indication of the efficiency level of all the individual inputs used. This is because the efficiency of individual inputs may vary and suggests that greater effort should be made to improve such efficiencies in comparison with overall technical efficiency.