Agricultural water management is a vital practice in ensuring reduction, and environmental protection. After decades of successfully expanding irrigation and improving productivity, farmers and managers face an emerging crisis in the form of poorly performing irrigation schemes, slow modernization, declining investment, constrained water availability, and environmental degradation. More and better investments in agricultural water are needed. In response, the World Bank, in conjunction with many partner agencies, has compiled a selection of good experiences that can guide practitioners in the design of quality investments in agricultural water. The messages of this publication center around the key challenges to agricultural water management, specifically: building policies and incentives; designing institutional reforms; investing in irrigation systems improvement and modernization; investing in groundwater irrigation; investing in drainage and water quality management; investing in water management in rain-fed agriculture; investing in agricultural water management in multipurpose operations; coping with extreme climatic conditions; and assessing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of agricultural water investments.
The World Bank Group has a unique opportunity to match the increases in financing for agriculture with a sharper focus on improving agricultural growth and productivity in agriculture-based economies, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa. Greater effort will be needed to connect...
This work summarizes background papers prepared for the World Bank Group with significant input from government counterparts and other development partners. It takes stock of major recent developments and argues that a lot has been achieved in the last decade...
Livelihoods, food security, and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly dependent on land management practices to generate natural ecosystem goods and services. Out of a total population of about 717 million people, almost 60 percent depend for their livelihood...
The Development Marketplace 2009 focused on adaptation to climate change. This paper identifies lessons from the Marketplace and assesses their implications for adaptation support. The findings are based on: statistical tabulation of all proposals; in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of...
The purpose of this paper is to provide forward-looking recommendations for linking agriculture and nutrition by looking back over the 40 years since both nutrition and rural development began at the Bank in 1973. This paper sets out to explore...