Opportunities to invest in groundwater-fed irrigation Sub-Saharan Africa – A regional assessment under alternative energy solutions

Abstract:

Groundwater is a key component of water resources. Every year, hundreds of billions of cubic meters of groundwater are withdrawn for water supply, primarily for irrigated agriculture. Irrigation groundwater use has great implications for global food production. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lags behind other regions in groundwater irrigation development. There is keen interest in accelerating investment for groundwater irrigation to boost crop production in the region. However, investing in groundwater irrigation in SSA is a complex decision that is influenced by many factors, especially at country or regional levels. Particularly, energy is required for lifting groundwater for irrigation; widespread energy poverty in SSA implies that development of groundwater irrigation requires hand in hand expansion of energy systems. A modeling framework for strategic groundwater irrigation investment planning analysis with coupled energy planning capacity was developed to address the decisional challenge. At the core of the framework is an agent-based model, which simulates expansion of groundwater-fed irrigated agriculture under combined constraints of water availability and economic profitability and uses information obtained from cost comparison analysis on cost-effectiveness of groundwater pumping powered by various energy sources to inform the selection of appropriate energy solutions. The model allows estimation of not only the total land area with groundwater irrigation development potential but also the development potential under different energy solutions. The presentation will include the results from applying this integrated modeling approach across whole Sub-Saharan African region.