Opportunities for Agricultural Water Management Interventions in the Mwembeshi Watershed in Zambia

Agricultural water management (AWM) interventions are increasingly being promoted as a first step to enable positive development, alleviating food insecurity and poverty in the smallholder farming systems that dominate rural sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia (see Figures 3 and 5). These AWMs range from in-situ soil and water management improvements (conservation tillage, terraces, pitting) to supplemental and full irrigation systems, drawing from a wide variety of water sources in the landscape. However, re-allocation of water can potentially undermine other uses of the same water, for other livelihood purposes or, indirectly, by reducing availability for support of different ecosystem services. In Mwembeshi watershed, potential opportunities and possible water-related impacts of AWM interventions were assessed. Scenarios were developed through national consultations of the Agricultural Water Management Solutions project (http://awm-solutions.iwmi.org/iwmi.org/) to identify potential impacts of various AWM interventions on the water resources in Mwembeshi. An assessment of watershed-level relevant formal and informal actors identified opportunities and constraints for AWM implementation as well as potential options for negotiating negative externalities of AWM interventions.

Read the Policy Brief (0.9 MB)