Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
are an important tool to bridge gaps in surface water availability at village
level in semi-arid rural areas around the world. In West Africa, thousands of
such reservoirs can be found. Small reservoirs are a widely common
infrastructure in the White Volta sub-basin for the provision of water mainly
for irrigation (<100ha), for livestock watering, fishing/aquaculture,
construction and domestic use (van de Giesen, 2006).
Dam development in Burkina Faso began in 1920. With the severe drought
years in the seventies, development of reservoirs increased. Most irrigation
development in Burkina Faso takes the form of village-level schemes with
imperfect hydraulic control. In 1991, 1,100 village dams (small reservoirs)
had been built, mainly for cattle and drinking water purposes (Sally, 1997).
Presently, many dams are built or converted to function also as dams for
irrigation purposes. By the year 2000 Burkina Faso had between 1,000 and
2,000 dams (ICOLD members-Burkina Faso, 2001).
In the Ghana part of the White Volta sub-basin, the government started the
construction of small reservoirs in 1951. These reservoirs were mainly used
for the supply of water for livestock, domestic and irrigation purposes. Apart
from the government a few NGOs are also developing small reservoirs as
poverty reduction strategies for communities in Northern Ghana. Currently
there are 156 small reservoirs in the Upper East Region of Ghana (IFAD,
2005).
In the 1960s and 1970s various development cooperation organisations were
involved in funding projects whereby dams were constructed in order to help
rural communities in supplying sufficient water to meet their demand.
However, not all systems remained functional, which engineers often based
on a lack of experience or interest of farmers to maintain the irrigation
infrastructure.
During the 1980s, however, it was realised that the problems with small
reservoir irrigation schemes were not due to incompetent farmers per se, but
were caused by the fact that the knowledge of the farmers had not been used
and that local economic, social and cultural contexts had not been taken into
account in designing the systems. As a result, organisations such as the
World Bank, FAO and IWMI from the 1990s started to invest in
rehabilitation of the existing systems and in improving the planning,
operation and maintenance of the systems. A typical example is the
rehabilitation of 64 small reservoirs by the International Fund for
Agricultural Development (IFAD) under the Upper East Land Conservation
and Rehabilitation Project Phase I (LACOSREP) in the Upper East Region
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