Background

APPIA was launched in March 2003. In East Africa: Ethiopia and Kenya, the APPIA project is implemented by IWMI sub-Regional office for Nile Basin and Eastern Africa. The Regional Association of Irrigation and Drainage is in charge of the West Africa component of the project that includes five countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.

The research questions

• What are the limiting factors of the performance of farmer-managed irrigation in Sub- Saharan Africa? APPIA is developing participatory methods to identify the limiting factors, how they are related and the opportunities for increased productivity and sustainability of farmer-managed irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• How to improve extension and other support services to irrigating farmers? APPIA evaluates extension and other support services to irrigating farmers and provides recommendations for more efficient and demand driven services in terms of themes, approach, target groups and institutional arrangements.

It should be stressed here that APPIA is not a pure research project but rather a development project with a research component.

Objectives

APPIA is to contribute to strategies planning and governance of the irrigation sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main objective is to produce and share information on irrigation performance amongst irrigation professionals in Sub-Saharan Africa and to promote more effective, cost efficient and sustainable extension and other support services to irrigating farmers.

Methods

• APPIA developed its own methodology termed PRDA for "Participative Rapid Diagnosis and Action Planning of Irrigated Agricultural systems" to analyze irrigation performance together with farmers and plan practical steps to improve irrigation productivity and sustainability. National irrigation personals were trained to PRDA and applied it of a reasoned sample of irrigation schemes in Ethiopia and Kenya.
• Lessons learnt at local (scheme) level and comparisons of results between schemes were then used to make more general policy recommendations, which were in turn tested at local level. The APPIA approach is of a cyclic nature and alternating between information collection at local level and dissemination at national or regional level as indicated in the figure below.

Project leader

Researchers

Major Donors

Project Duration