A new project in Burkina Faso will help people from about 20,000 poor rural households intensify and diversify crop production through new and newly refurbished and innovative small-scale irrigation schemes.
The US$19 million Small-scale Irrigation and Water Management Project will be partly financed by a US$11 million loan and a US$400,000 grant from IFAD.
The OPEC Fund for International Development will provide US$5 million in cofinancing. The Government of Burkina Faso will contribute US$2.6 million, and project participants a further US$50,000.
The project will be carried out in six provinces in the southwestern part of the country.
The project will begin with an in-depth information, education and communication campaign delivered through a variety of formal and informal channels. This will strengthen the capacity of participants to take part in project activities that help them instensify and diversify crops under irrigation and in inland valley bottoms. The project will support marketing activities to increase incomes and food security.
It will also work in communities affected by conflict. The six provinces have received an influx of migrants. As a result, there is now less and less land for more and more people. Irrigation is one way of producing higher-value crops on smaller plots of land, thereby descreasing population pressure and potential conflict.
Following negotiations over land and water access, the project will build 250 hectares of vegetable gardens equipped with low-pressure micro-irrigation technology. It will also refurbish 200 hectares of gravity-based, small-scale irrigation sites downstream from dams and construct small community-based irrigation sites and dams for agricultural and pastoral use. Estimates show that by the fifth year of the project, yearly agricultural production could increase by 4,700 tonnes of rice, 1,800 tonnes of vegetables, 314 tonnes of maize, and 1,700 tonnes of bananas.
With this project, IFAD has financed 11 programmes and projects in Burkina Faso, investing a total of more than US$140 million.
IFAD
