Agriculture uses more than 90% of Uzbekistan’s water use, and wasteful irrigation practices can be widely seen. Local Water Consumer Associations have a role to play in reversing this trend, but these newly established Associations have difficulty accounting for how much water has been delivered to whom with any precision, and that leads to conflicts that undermine farmers’ incentives. Accounting tools have been the missing component in more careful water use.
The CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and International Water Management Institute (IWMI) have developed and tested some of these tools with Uzbek Water Consumer Associations, and the effects have quickly risen to the national level. The breakthrough technology is a low-cost device called a Smartstick: a sensor that delivers measurements of water level and corresponding discharge volume from the field to a crowd-sourced…
