How Smart Valleys plans water control with valley users

Inland valleys are attractive places to grow rice partly because water naturally collects there. 

But the same feature makes them difficult to manage. 

Water does not respect farm boundaries. A bund or outlet that improves conditions on one plot can change drainage on another. Better water control can also make land more productive and, over time, more valuable. So decisions about water flows can alter the balance between neighbouring land users. 

The Smart Valleys approach is designed around this problem. Before bunds, canals, inlets or outlets are laid out, farmers and other valley users map how water moves through the valley and who has claims over the land it crosses. 

A new twelve-step framework developed through CGIAR Climate Action formalises this process. It draws on work with 1,789 participants across 218 inland valleys in Mali, Niger and Nigeria, as well as two decades of Smart Valleys research led by AfricaRice and its partners. 

Farmers, livestock keepers, processors, traders, landowners and tenants are brought into the planning process, with women and young people included in the same deliberations. Technical design follows: proposed structures are marked with colour-coded pegs, local users organise construction, and layouts can be adjusted as experience shows where water collects, drains well or creates problems. 

The aim is not to hand over engineering decisions wholesale but to make farmers become engineers to respond to how the valley is actually used. 

Water control starts before construction 

Participants first map water flows and land tenure, then consider these alongside climate risks and competing claims. As the physical layout takes shape, they agree rules for using the works and assign responsibility for construction and maintenance. 

The framework therefore tracks more than infrastructure, it records whose interests shape decisions, who puts forward proposals, who controls the resource and who receives the benefits. 

User communities and management committees work with local authorities, while multi-stakeholder Living Labs connect them with actors at national or regional level. This gives questions of water use, maintenance and dispute resolution an institutional home beyond the project team. 

The arrangements differ by country. In Mali, 13 cooperatives connect farmers with processors and traders. In Niger, women accounted for just over half of valley users and have a central role in governance. In the more commercially oriented Nigerian valleys, where women are less involved in field-level rice farming, processing and trade offer other entry points. 

Land tenure, markets and local institutions therefore shape who can participate and on what terms, while climate, soils and hydrology determine the water problems to be solved. 

What the evidence on Smart Valleys shows 

Smart Valleys is not a new approach. Research across seven West African countries has found that rice yields in developed valleys increased, on average, from 2.5 to 4.8 tonnes per hectare. 

That evidence comes from two decades of Smart Valleys work which provides a strong basis for the production benefits of better water control. 

There are practical limits too. Not every inland valley is suitable for the approach, and adoption depends on factors such as soil and drainage conditions, labour, land tenure, market access and the strength of local farmer organisations. Smart Valleys also offers partial, adaptive water control rather than full irrigation. 

So while there is substantial evidence on production, this newer framework still has to show how well its arrangements for participation, decision-making and benefit-sharing work over time. 

Testing the approach over time 

Valleys have been assessed and plans drawn up with local users, and implementation is now beginning at selected sites. A lot will depend on what happens as the project progresses beyond planning and project teams become less involved. 

Local users may have helped shape the design, but that influence will need to carry through into the way the works are managed. The same is true of the benefits. If improved water control raises productivity and land values, can those gains remain broadly shared? Over time, the answer may become clearer in the ordinary business of keeping the system running, particularly when repairs are needed or disagreements arise. 

Finance is another unresolved issue. None of the three Living Labs included a bank, microfinance provider, insurer or blended-finance provider when the framework report was completed. Expansion will eventually require ways to finance construction and upkeep without weakening local control. 

Yield and water-management outcomes will remain important. But the number of valleys reached is not, by itself, enough to show whether the approach is working as intended. 

If Smart Valleys is meant to be locally led, local influence has to be measured too: who participates, whose proposals shape the design, who makes decisions after construction and how benefits are shared. 

This work is carried out with support from the CGIAR Climate Action Program. We would like to thank all funders who supported this research through their contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund: https://www.cgiar.org/funders/