How does water affects development in Africa

Just a quick blog entry from me today. Often when looking at the relationship between food and water in Africa many overlook the oceans and the abundance of resources they provide. Academics tend to focus on irrigation potentials, water harvesting solution, trade links, virtual water etc. which are primarily to do with the land. In West Africa fish provide many people with their daily animal protein and the fishery sector provides employment and income for 7 million people ( Belhabib et al ).   Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 aims to ‘conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development’ but despite the importance of the fishery sector in West Africa, the region has seen fish stocks decline, driven by over-exploitation and illegal fishing ( Daniels et al ).   See the video below for a quick overview: Fish decline has been especially prevalent in Ghana, where inland fisheries are being over exploited and illegal fishing ...

First of all, what is irrigation? Irrigation is the controlled amount of water to plants at timed intervals, depending on the plant’s needs. In developed countries, a common type of irrigation are lawn sprinklers systems, often seen in parks and golf courses which turn on automatically using an irrigation controller, in less developed countries irrigation can be as simple as ‘surface irrigation’ (see figure 1) where gravity distributes the water and there is no technology involved.    Figure 1, surface irrigation In this blog post, I’m going to discuss two types of irrigation; small-scale irrigation & large-scale irrigation and and give examples of schemes which have succeed and failed. In Westernised countries large-scale irrigation is prevalent, and incredibly efficient due to technological advancements, but Africa lags behind as it has the lowest agricultural productivity in the world, so is large-scale irrigation the answer? Africa has an abundance of poten...