Paper short abstract:

We present the findings from a systematic literature review of the impacts of farmer-led irrigation development (FLID) in Sub-Saharan Africa. We summarize the impacts of FLID across different dimensions of farmer well-being and highlight the inconsistencies and biases in impact assessments.

Paper long abstract:

Water scarcity is a key driver of chronic poverty and hunger in many developing countries where most rural households depend on agriculture for sustenance. Scaling up irrigation development in these regions is critical to safeguard food security and strengthen farmers’ ability to respond to climatic shocks. In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis on supporting small-scale farmer-led irrigation development (FLID) as an alternative to traditional large-scale irrigation projects. In this paper, we systematically review the literature to assess the impacts of FLID on smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that is expected to face some of the greatest food security challenges in the future. We find that the impacts of FLID on income and food security are heterogenous, but overall positive. Increased agricultural yields and multiple cropping are associated with positive income and food security outcomes. We find some evidence of adverse impacts on gender equality, health and the environment, and some studies show that FLID can be biased towards relatively wealthier farmers. Our work also reveals some inconsistencies and biases in the FLID impact assessment literature. We find that most of the reviewed impact assessments are clustered in Ethiopia. Most assessments compare FLID with non-irrigating households but impacts across different typologies of FLID is missing in literature. Although all these impact studies on FLID are clustered in a few countries, network analysis suggests that authors seldom engage with other impact assessments and few research papers appear to build on ideas from other papers, especially from other disciplines.