Improving the reliability of water supply for agriculture is a necessary, though not sufficient condition, for reducing poverty and malnutrition and generating faster agricultural growth, in areas where average rainfall that is seasonal, highly variable in time and space, and increasingly unreliable is the major impediment to farm households increasing their production of food, cash crops, and livestock products, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa.

The agricultural water management technologies reviewed in this study, under the right conditions, do lead to substantial improvements in households’ food security and incomes, and they do so in a cost-effective manner. This is especially true for treadle pumps, low cost drip and sprinkler systems, the system of rice intensification, clay pot irrigation, conservation farming practices that integrate nutrient and water management, and a variety of in-situ and ex-situ water harvesting and storage technologies.

Despite the significant economic advantages and the concerted support of the government and NGOs, the extent of adoption of agricultural water management technologies remains unsatisfactory. Adoption, adaptation, or rejection decisions are a function of many factors including lack of information or access, lack of fit between the technologies on offer and the capacities and needs of households, inefficient promotion strategies, flawed assumptions about households’ needs and capacities and the real costs and benefits from their perspectives, ineffective targeting, lack of capacity to manage projects offering a large array of small-scale technologies to thousands of poor households, and lack of credit.

One of the controversies surrounding the agricultural water management technologies is whether they are suitable for adoption by poorer households. Several studies have shown that the better off farmers dominate the current adopters. Policy relevant strategic recommendations for targeted the poor with these technologies are:

Shifting Water Saving Technologies from Investment Mode to Input Mode: If smallholders and poor farmers are to be targeted, policymakers must understand that promoting micro-irrigation technologies through capital investments that offer returns over 8-10 years is not the way forward.

Creating ‘First Mover Advantage’: Micro-irrigation is seen as a high risk venture, and farmers tend to wait for others in the neighbourhood to try out and test new technologies first before they adopt their own systems. Some success has been in achieved in programs that have tried to overcome this obstacle by providing special incentives to ‘first movers’.

From Custom-Solutions to Package Solutions to Farmer-Assembled Systems: Today, there is a need to transfer the technology into the hands of the users. Farmers are demanding components of drip kits like pipes, drippers etc., which they can assemble locally and the biggest example of this shift is the popularity of Pepsee systems in India.

The direct marketing approach taken by NGOs has shown to be more effective in bridging the gap between the supply and demand of micro-irrigation technologies than the traditional government extension approach.