Millennium Villages Blog

An irrigation canal bringing water from the dam

Surrounded by an arid landscape and set on eroded soil, the Millennium Village of Koraro, Ethiopia, and its 55,000 inhabitants face an enormous challenge: how to maximize water use, especially for agriculture and smallholder irrigation.

Before the project started in 2005, water availability for domestic use and irrigation was a major obstacle to development, in spite of two rivers running through the cluster of villages. The limited accessible water sources were unsafe for human consumption. Sixty percent of the hand-dug wells were contaminated. The closest river was a 2-4 km walk from most homesteads. The rivers’ surface flow was seasonal and communities had to rely on sub-surface flow, accessed by scooping sand or digging holes in the dry riverbed. This traditional source often yields unsafe water due to contamination associated with poor sanitation.

Drip irrigation system in use

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) has introduced a number of innovative and improved water sources both for domestic use and crop production under smallholder irrigation systems. To date, four micro-dams of 50,000 - 130,000 m3 have been constructed by MVP in collaboration with the World Food Programme’s food-for-work initiative. However, the current surface irrigation, which relies on gravity to channel the water from the dam to the field, is inefficient and covers limited land (5-10 ha per micro-dam). It uses 12,500m3/ha per season compared to 2,500m3/ha if drip irrigation technology is adopted. The MVP is planning on introducing drip irrigation to the cluster in order to increase irrigable area five-fold.

Clean water at a community water point

Another irrigation system being promoted is hand-dug wells. Those allow irrigating up to 1.5 ha with surface irrigation and 7.5 ha with drip irrigation. The project has planned to construct 38 such wells to irrigate smallholder farms. They are 8 meters in diameter and lined with rubble stones to stabilize the walls and prevent them from collapsing. Young men from the community are contracted to do the job. The hand-dug wells are usually operated communally, using a motorized pump secured through credit from a local cooperative.

A number of pumping irrigation systems are also proposed from different streams. But for them to be efficient, they require the construction of dams due to the seasonality of flow. In total, if an efficient irrigation system is adopted, there is a potential to increase irrigated land from 20 ha to more than 400 ha in Koraro. The irrigable area can also be increased if deep boreholes are constructed for irrigation to take advantage of the electricity grid being extended in the cluster by the MVP and the Ethiopian government.

This structure helps control runoff

Environmental degradation is also being addressed through soil conservation measures, mainly by building stone barriers along terraces, and percolation ponds and trenches/ditches which reduce runoff and recharge ground water. Koraro village experiences high runoff from the adjacent Geralta Mountains, which has had a negative effect on land degradation due to the nature of the soil – loose sandy soil that is highly erodible. The MVP has attempted to reverse this trend by constructing a number of percolation ponds (up to 100 targeted) to reduce runoff, increase percolation (recharging groundwater) and baseflows – increase surface and ground water availability.

Therefore, despite the water scarcity and land degradation in Koraro, the MVP has developed sustainable interventions to promote smallholder irrigation and reverse land degradation. However, more financial resources are required to realize the MVP dream of attaining the full potential of irrigation as one of the main economic empowerment strategies in Koraro.

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