Since 2006, Tanzania has aimed to expand irrigation to one million hectares by 2020, a target reaffirmed by the Minister for Water and Irrigation in autumn last year. [1]

Currently, only five per cent — 461,000 hectares — of Tanzania’s cultivated land is irrigated, out of an estimated 29.4 million hectares available. [1] One explanation for this is that surprisingly little attention has been paid to irrigation in Sub-Saharan African since the revival of interest in agricultural development signalled by the Maputo declaration of 2003. [2]

Public investment in much of Africa has focused instead on improving seeds and encouraging farmers to use more fertilisers. Reasons for this are not hard to find: many irrigation schemes developed in the 1960s and 1970s ran over budget and over time, encountered all manner of technical and social problems, and produced meagre returns

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