Jan 07 2010

More Hope for the Farmers of Africa

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Last month, NEXT100 described a simple but remarkable agricultural technique taking root in arid and impoverished West Africa--the cultivation of crops in pits, called zai holes, that store water and prevent erosion.

Now a team of Stanford-led experts report on another promising innovation in the region: Solar-powered pumps in the West African country of Benin are dramatically increasing farm yields and incomes for desperately poor rural families who get by on just a dollar a day.  

Malnutrition in the area is serious because water is scarce and the deep groundwater makes irrigation impractical without expensive and polluting diesel-powered pumps.

The Benin Solar Irrigation Project was made possible by assistance from an American NGO, the Solar Electric Light Fund, which promotes electrification of poor villages that are off the grid, mostly in Asia and Africa. In 2007, it began a program to electrify an entire district of northern Benin with photovoltaic panels to serve drip irrigation systems, schools, clinics and community centers.

To gauge the effectiveness of the investment, it worked with Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment to rigorously study the results of the irrigation program.

The researchers found that households with access to solar-powered irrigation were able to grow enough crops to consume several pounds of their own vegetables each week, a major upgrade of their diet, and earn another $7 to $8 from surplus crop sales each week. The payback time for the system was estimated at less than three years.

The program is also a huge boon to women, who traditionally tend the gardens, by cutting the time they spend watering by 50 percent, freeing them up to earn additional money.

"With the proper support," the researchers concluded, "successful widespread adoption of photovoltaic drip irrigation systems could be an important source of poverty alleviation and food security in the marginal environments common to sub-Saharan Africa."

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