REVIEW OF IRRIGATION DEVELOPMENT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA - Sustainable Irrigation Development in the White Volta Sub-Basin - page 55

3.4.1 High Irrigation Development Cost

Inocencio et al. (2007) compared irrigation development in sub-Saharan
Africa with other developing areas, and confirmed that it is more expensive
to develop irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa than in other parts of the world.
In sampling 314 irrigation schemes implemented in developing countries, the
average cost of a new irrigation scheme in sub-Saharan Africa was
US$14,500/ha and US$6,000/ha elsewhere. Rehabilitation costs amounted to
US$8,200/ha in sub-Saharan Africa against US$2,300/ha elsewhere. The high
cost is related to the lack of economies of scale because sub-Saharan Africa
has many relatively small irrigation schemes (Faurès et al., 2007). Inadequate
local expertise in planning, designing and construction of irrigation projects
and, hence, the involvement of expensive expatriate expertise at all stages of
the project cycle at the early stages of nationhood have also been cited as
reasons for high cost of irrigation development (Namara et al., 2010). It is
further speculated that the best areas for irrigation schemes development in
sub-Saharan Africa have been almost exhausted leading to higher
construction cost in future irrigation projects (Faurès et al., 2007). This is
further compounded by the need to mitigate the social and environmental
costs associated with these developments. This has reduced the rate of
development of new irrigation schemes across sub-Saharan Africa.
Due to the high costs of Large-scale Irrigation projects, in the anxiety of
planners to meet project targets for the national economic benefit, the
government sets up its own administration structures for managing the
schemes. The administrative structures are mostly authoritarian and they
compel the direct producers to comply with enforced artificial pricing of
commodities (Barnett, 1984). This has resulted in challenges where social,
economic and producer benefits cannot be balanced and eventually result in
low productivity due to lack of farmer interest.

3.4.2 Lack of Access to Credit

Starting in the early 1980s countries across the development spectrum had to
adopt a series of policy measures aimed at coping with the severe
international economic crisis. An increasing number of countries had to go
through economic adjustment processes, either because the drying up of
capital inflows left no other option, or because this type of adjustment was
made a precondition by the private banks and the multilateral agencies
before new money would be released (Edwards and van Wijnbergen, 1992).
As a result countries like Ghana introduced the Structural Adjustment