Costing Rainwater Harvesting

1. Costing Rainwater Harvesting For Dryland Smallholder Farmers June 13, 2019

2. I. Technologies and Estimated Costs

3. Problem • Undernutrition rates in Africa have been increasing in the past 3 years, jeopardizing prospects of meeting SDG 2 (ending hunger, achieving food security and improved nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture) • This trend is linked to agricultural production • 95% of Africa’s farmed land is dependant on rainfall • Production is predominantly on a subsistence-level basis and on small land holdings (< 2 ha), which are not delivering improvements to human welfare • Sufficient food production for the population throughout the continent is not guaranteed, and the threat of hunger persists

4. Motivation In Africa: • More than 400 million people live in drylands that receive between 200 and 1000 mm of rainfall per year • Projected to grow to 740 million by 2030 • Unpredictable and erratic rainfall patterns affect agricultural production, especially during the crops’ blooming time when water is critically important • Due to high evaporation rates, runoff and percolation, only a small proportion of rainwater is available for crop uptake (15-30%) • As the impacts of climate change deepen, this problem will likely exacerbate due to rising temperatures, even in places where total rainfall is projected to increase

5. Ward, Christopher, with Raphael Torquebiau and Hua Xie. 2016. Improved Agricultural Water Management for Africa’s Drylands. World Bank Studies. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi: 10.1596/978-1-4648-0832-6. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 IGO (page 8)

6. Rockstrom & Falkenmark, 2000. “Semiarid Crop Production from a Hydrological Perspective: Gap between Potential and Actual Yields

7. Intervention We propose to significantly expand the use of rainwater harvesting technologies for smallholder farmers in the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa. Rainwater harvesting systems will serve to: • Provide life-saving supplementary irrigation for annual crops during critical stages of plant development • Extend the growing season by providing a source of water for off-season cultivation of kitchen/market gardens • Provide an additional water source for watering livestock or to use in the household

8. Why is this not happening already? Despite demonstrated cost-effectiveness of water harvesting, current interventions are not happening at scale across Africa. • Current interventions remain insufficient to meet the desired needs • Underinvestment in water management technologies • Water harvesting projects require significant up-front investments, incurring short-term losses in order to attain long-term benefits, which is unaffordable for many smallholder farmers • Therefore the need for an integrated approach on water harvesting interventions for agriculture production

9. Approach Interventions at the farm-level • Estimated 37 million farms in 2010, that will grow to about 59 million by 2030 A rainwater harvesting system has 4 main components: • Catchment: collects rainwater from a surface (eg. roofs, rock surfaces, ditches) • Storage: holds water in place for later use (eg. dams, tanks) • Withdrawal: takes water out of storage (eg. manual pumps, motor pumps) • Delivery: distributes water to crops (eg. drip systems, sprinklers, hoses) Combinations of various technologies are implemented as packages that are suitable to farms’ individual circumstances and budgetary needs.

10. Catchment • Largely dependent on on-site availability of natural features and built structures. Can be a hillside, rock outcropping, a roadside ditch, a roof, a patio, any other hard surface, or even the land itself • The limiting factor is the size of the catchment

11. Storage Must be suitable for the both the amount of water required as well as how long it is expected to be held. • A simple earth dam built right into a hillside catchment can be built cheaply and easily, but will lose water quickly through percolation and evaporation, and is prone to being destroyed by heavy rainfall events.

12. Withdrawal Trade-offs in expense and labor requirements. • Treadle pumps have been upheld as technologies that can be locally manufactured and pump easily • Petrol-powered water pumps, such as those used in larger irrigation projects, may be feasible • Solar-powered electric pumps are still rather expensive for large-scale implementation, but have low recurring costs

13. Delivery How the water will be distributed to the crops. Tradeoffs in efficiency and expense • Spate irrigation is not likely a practical solution for supplemental irrigation • A simple watering can is simple, cheap, and effective • Drip irrigation systems have the highest efficiency of all alternatives

14. Technology packages and estimated costs Since farm-level water harvesting requirements will vary according to individual needs, costs will vary depending on the suitability of different technologies. An example of a low-priced, non-intensive system could be:

15. Technology packages and estimated costs (cont’d) An example of a high-cost, high-intensity system:

16. Selection of a Broadly-Applicable Package (for total cost estimation)

17. Total Cost Estimation • Estimated close to 57 million dryland smallholder farms to reach by 2028 • Estimated total cost to come out close to $20 billion in constant 2017 dollars (US $23 billion in current dollars), based on the aforementioned $355 package

18. Implementation Plan

19. II. Green Water Fund

20. Objective and Purpose Objective: • to enhance all the partners' effectiveness in Africa to scale up rainfed agriculture • to give donors the chance to contribute funds to a facility dedicated to a well-defined goal and a clear set of projects fully compatible with the funding priorities Purpose: • to support small-scale African farmers in improving agricultural productivity and increasing resilience, particularly in adapting to climate change. • to finance productive, protective, and social infrastructure

21. Challenges and opportunities Funding Challenges • Focus on large-scale irrigation but not on Rainwater harvesting. • No incentive to stimulate and attract investment in rainwater harvesting for smallholder farms. • Financial Constraints: • Unpredictability, unreliability, insufficiency/inadequacy of ODA. • Inadequacy of ODA to meet the total investment requirements. • Low level of mobilizing domestic resources due to various factors Funding Opportunities • Establishing a multi-partnership arrangement, with a blending of financial resources. • Mobilizing financial resources internally, which ideally should only be supplemented by external sources. • Redirecting some of existing sources of funding (drought disaster, emergency food, and climate change) to the green water fund. • Tracking, stopping and redirecting illicit financial flows to the green water fund. • Leveraging private sector capital. • Fulfilling commitments • as per the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA) on financing development. • as per the Maputo Declaration of 2003 and the Malabo Declaration of 2014. • Introducing a supportive fiscal regime.

22. Funding Framework Institutional System • The establishment of a Secretariat to manage the fund • The presence of a Board • to overseeing the operations of the Secretariat, and • assessing the overall performance of the funds. Partnership • A funding alliance with international and regional financial institutions • Information sharing and coordinating the activities in the African countries with organizations that have similar programmes on sustainable agriculture and food security • A strategic alliance with regional and international organisations that are implementing irrigation programmes in Africa • Public-Private Partnership in the areas of agricultural value and supply chains. Eligibility • Conditional grant to the subsistence farmers in the semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions of Africa • Credit for semi-commercial farmers that can be operated through Micro-Finance institutions • Special attention to smallholder rural women farmers through establishing a particular grant system

23. Funding Framework (cont..) Operations • The operation of the GWF entails the involvement of the relevant country-level institutions to facilitate the implementation process. • The Secretariat of GWF develops a two years Strategic Plan starting from 2020 and ending in 2030. Disbursement and Replenishment • Opening a special bank account of USD and/or Euro for contributions to the GWF • Opening a designated project accounts at beneficiary countries level • Disbursement from the special account of the GWF to the designated project accounts of beneficiary countries on instalments basis and replenishment against the statement of expenditures. Monitoring • Incorporating appropriate metrics and indicators (input, output and outcome indicators) into the development of programs. • Carrying out monitoring transparently by independent, non-aligned evaluators that report to the secretariat’s M&E unit Expected Outcomes • Attaining in the range of $3.5 billion to fund the first two years (2021-2022) of implementation activities • Contextualizing the goal of the fund at the level of (sub)regions and countries, and developing roadmaps to the attainment of rainwater harvesting • Providing support from the GWF to those entities that have clear roadmaps to attaining this goal, as well as providing a blueprint for monitoring progress.

24. III. Conclusion

25. The current trajectory of rising food insecurity and the associated risks to malnutrition and stunting in Africa pose a significant challenge to the realization of the SDG 2 targets. • To address this situation, we are putting forward a strategy to provide dryland smallholder farmers with the capability to capture rainwater and use it when it is most urgently needed, taking advantage of a wide range of proven technologies to capture, store, withdraw, and deliver water. • We estimate unit and total costs that can enable us to support up to 58 million farmers by 2028. • We recommend the establishment of a well-organized green water fund, with a competent secretariat overseen by a board of vested stakeholders. Accordingly, the key approaches that we want to emphasize are: • that there be strong POLITICAL LEADERSHIP to ensure the effectiveness of the fund • that our initiative does not silence or exclude anyone from the processes of planning, design, implementation, M&E, and assessment. • that we work together in a non-rival, cooperative fashion to tackle this long-standing African problem. • That we raise the collective voices of the voiceless million farmers of Africa.

26. Let’s strive to enable the vulnerable to secure their livelihoods This concludes our presentation. We welcome any brief questions for clarification at this time. Please reserve your discussion and feedback questions until after the panel discussion.