Solar-powered irrigation: A pathway to low-carbon farming in sub-Saharan Africa
Irrigation is a potentially transformative technology for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) that can address many of the region’s food system challenges, including growing food import dependence and stagnating rural employment—both linked to low agricultural productivity growth, poor market access, and weak financial systems—as well as climate change, characterized by unpredictable rainfall, prolonged dry spells, and floods.
Irrigation is a potentially transformative technology for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) that can address many of the region’s food system challenges, including growing food import dependence and stagnating rural employment—both linked to low agricultural productivity growth, poor market access, and weak financial systems—as well as climate change, characterized by unpredictable rainfall, prolonged dry spells, and floods.
Introduced at scale, irrigation could double or triple agricultural production on existing agricultural areas and reduce climate-related production risk. Thus, it could support more production of all crops—and in particular riskier, high-value crops such as vegetables and fruits essential to food system transformation and better nutrition. Evidence also suggests that irrigation could double agricultural incomes and dramatically reduce the region’s dependency on food imports.
Small-scale or farmer-led irrigation offers a highly promising path to irrigation expansion: farmers develop the irrigation source, typically a groundwater well, on their own and purchase the irrigation technology themselves. Small-scale irrigation is particularly profitable for farmers and has seen much faster expansion than large-scale systems that typically take many years to plan and finance. But it faces a significant problem: the rapid transition from hand pumps to diesel-operated pumps that can lift more water from greater depths, but contribute directly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Thus, this form of irrigation risks undermining the very climate resilience it aims to promote.