The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has inaugurated a new solar irrigation support service for smallholder farmers in the country.
Known as IRRILINE, it is an advisory service designed to make solar-powered irrigation more accessible and effective for smallholder farmers.
It was developed through a partnership between IWMI, Farmerline, a company that develops solutions to increase access to farmers and simplifies transactions throughout the agricultural value chain, and Pumptech, dealers in water pumps in Ghana.
The aim is to provide farmers with practical irrigation guidance, access to solar systems, and connections to financing opportunities.
The Country Representative of IWMI, Professor Kehinde Olufunso Ogunjobi, speaking at the launching ceremony, acknowledged the beauty of co-creation and co-designing projects, with end users and private partner oragnisation and said it was the evidence of what “we are seeing here”.
Collaboration
Such collaborations, he said, was how the IWMI, could strengthen its research development.
Prof. Ogunjobi said IRRILINE was not just a tool for Ghana but a tool that could be scaled up across the entire West African region.
“It is a tool that is developed for our farmers, sustainable environment because my understanding is that the tool will be powered on sustainable energy source. It is for a sustainable envorinment and that is in synch with what we do at IWMI,” he added.
“We really need to develop these tools in order to help our farmers to improve their crop production yield and also for food security.”
Prof. Ogunjobi advised smallholder farmers to use the tool and come back with feedback so that IWMI could improve on it.
He was hopeful that development partners of the IWMI like the World Bank would invest more in the project to scale it beyond Ghana.
Water productivity
The IWMI Africa Director for Research Impact, Dr Olunfunke Cofie, explained that the IWMI developed support tools to help farmers to help development agencies, decision makers, policy makers and all categories of stakeholders who wanted to use water effectively to increase water productivity to ensure that water in the environment was used very well.
“We have so many tools, including those that can help us allocate water resources very well, those that can help us to monitor water quality and other innovations, which we can use together with other agriculture practices to enhance effective water use not only in irrigated systems but also in rain field systems,” Dr Cofie stated and said.
In that regard, she said “So we support the users of water resources to ensure at least we can manage what we have effectively, whether it is surface, ground water, waste or rain water.”
Dr Cofie further expressed appreciation to the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the academia and all other stakeholders for their support.
Background
Ghanaian farmers face challenges such as climate variability, rising fuel costs and unreliable rainfall.
Solar irrigation, therefore, provides a clean, cost-effective, and scalable solution.
IRRILINE, therefore, strengthens this opportunity by offering accessible irrigation guidance, targeted support to women farmers, and linkage to private-sector suppliers.
It also aligns with IWMI’s mission to promote climate-smart agriculture and water-efficient farming across the country.
Distribution
The Porject Lead and Deputy Country Representative & Senior Researcher – IWMI West and Central Africa, Dr Sander Zwart, said for his part said the institute was distributing first of the tool to female farmers in Northern Ghana and reiterated that “We want to scale it up to about thousand farmers by counting on the World Bank for investment on loans.”
Source:
www.graphic.com.gh
