Multi-stakeholder dialogue space on farmer-led irrigation development in Ghana: an instrument driving systemic change with private sector initiatives

Authors

  • Thai Minh International Water Management Institute
  • Olufunke Cofie International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Ghana
  • Nicole Lefore Texas A & M University, USA
  • Petra Schmitter International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Myanmar

Keywords:

private sector, farmer-led irrigation, multi-stakeholder dialogues, systemic change, Ghana

Abstract

Private sector actors bring expertise, resources, and new perspectives to agricultural development, but the tendency to short-term approaches and market-based orientation has been unable to drive a systemic change in the development agenda. We explore how multi-stakeholder dialogues can capitalize on and trickle systemic change through private sector involvement. Analysis from the farmer-led irrigation development multi-stakeholder dialogue space (FLI-MDS) in Ghana shows the need for a physical and institutional space to cater for and merge different stakeholder interests. For all stakeholders, the institutional space is a multi-level-playing institution which can trickle systemic change by leveraging the private sector?s investments with multi-stakeholders? collaboration, interactive learning, and potential support for commercial scaling of FLI. For private sector actors, a physical space for collaboration is crucial. It enables them to envisage their commercial interests, opening up opportunities for collaboration and mobilization of resources. Ensuring long term sustainability of an FLI-MDS requires catering for the private sector needs for a physical dialogue space to trickle systemic change and accelerate commercialization in farmer-led irrigation development.

Author Biographies

Olufunke Cofie, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Ghana

Dr. Olufunke Cofie is a Principal Researcher and IWMI Representative for West Africa, with responsibility for leading the development and implementation of IWMI?s research agenda in the sub-region. She holds a PhD degree in Soil Science with over 20 years? research experience in natural resources management. Her research focusses on water and sanitation linkages to agriculture as well as on smallholder agricultural water management.

Nicole Lefore, Texas A & M University, USA

Dr Nicole Lefore is the director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation, which is hosted by the Norman Borlaug Institute at Texas A & M University. With over 25 years of international experience in research, policy advocacy and project implementation related to development, her research focuses on natural resources (water and land) and institutions, including household scale irrigation, gender and equality, smallholder finance models, and qualitative and participatory research methods. She completed a PhD in Government at University of Virginia and MSc in Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Petra Schmitter, International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Myanmar

Dr Petra Schmitter is a Senior Researcher at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Myanmar, and leader of the Research Group on Sustainable and Resilient Food Production Systems. Her main research focusses on developing suitable water solutions for smallholder farmers to improve their agricultural resilience and to assess the impact of scaling those solutions on water resource availability and quality at different scales. She has over 30 peer reviewed publications in the field of farmer-led irrigation, water productivity, hydrological processes, biogeochemistry, land degradation and hydrological modelling.

References

Amerasinghe, P., Cofie, O.O., Labri, T.O., and Drechsel, P. (2013). Facilitating outcomes: multi-stakeholder processes for influencing policy change on urban agriculture in selected West African and South Asian cities (Vol. 153). IWMI.

Balana, B.B., Bizimana, J.C., Richardson, J.W., Lefore, N., Adimassu, Z., and Herbst, B.K. (2020). Economic and food security effects of small-scale irrigation technologies in northern Ghana. Water Resources and Economics, 29, pp.100141.

Baumüller, H., Husmann, C., and Von Braun, J. (2014). Innovative business approaches for the reduction of extreme poverty and marginality? In Marginality (pp.331-351). Springer, Dordrecht.

Brouwer, H., Hiemstra, W., van Vugt, S., and Walters, H. (2013). Analysing stakeholder power dynamics in multi-stakeholder processes: insights of practice from Africa and Asia. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 9, pp.11-31.

Cadilhon, J.J. (2013). The functions of facilitation in multi-stakeholder learning: lessons learned from capacity development on value chains management in innovation platforms in Burkina Faso and Ghana. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 9, pp.174-181.

Davies, J., Maru, Y., Hall, A., Abdourhamane, I.K., Adegbidi, A., Carberry, P., Dorai, K., Stella Ama Ennin, S.A., Etwire, P.M., McMillan, L., Njoya, A., Ouedraogo, S., Traoré, A., Traoré-Gué, N.J., Watson J., Njoya, A. (2018). Understanding innovation platform effectiveness through experiences from west and central Africa. Agricultural Systems, 165, pp.321-334.

de Fraiture, C., and Giordano, M. (2014). "Small private irrigation: A thriving but overlooked sector, Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, 131, pp.167-174.

Dickens, L., and Watkins, K. (1999). Action research: rethinking Lewin. Management Learning, 30, pp.127-140.

Dittoh, S., Awuni, J.A., Akuriba, M.A. (2013). Small pumps and the poor: a field survey in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Water International, 38, pp.449-464.

Drechsel, P., Cofie, O.O., van Veenhuizen, R., and Larbi, T.O. (2008). Linking research, capacity building, and policy dialogue in support of informal irrigation in urban West Africa. Irrigation and Drainage 57, pp.268-278.

Elden, M., and Chisholm, R.F. (1993). Emerging varieties of action research: Introduction to the special issue. Human Relations, 46, pp.121-142

Elkington, J. (1998). Partnerships from cannibals with forks: The triple bottom line of 21st??century business. Environmental quality management, 8, pp.37-51.

German, L., Cavane, E., Sitoe, A., and Braga, C. (2016). Private investment as an engine of rural development: A confrontation of theory and practice for the case of Mozambique. Land Use Policy, 51, pp.1-14.

Hall, A. (2006). Public-private sector partnerships in an agricultural system of innovation: concepts and challenges. International Journal of Technology Management & Sustainable Development, 5(1), pp.3-20.

Husmann, C., and Kubik, Z. (2019). Foreign direct investment in the African food and agriculture sector: trends, determinants and impacts. Determinants and Impacts (April 12, 2019). Accessed on 8 April 2020: https://www.zef.de/fileadmin/user_upload/ZEF_DP_274.pdf

Kilelu, C.W., Klerkx, L., and Leeuwis, C. (2013). Unravelling the role of innovation platforms in supporting co-evolution of innovation: Contributions and tensions in a smallholder dairy development programme. Agricultural Systems, 118, pp.65-77.

Kilelu, C.W., Klerkx, L., Leeuwis, C., and Hall, A. (2011). Beyond knowledge brokering: An exploratory study on innovation intermediaries in an evolving smallholder agricultural system in Kenya. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 7, pp.84-108.

Lefore, N. (2015). Strengthening facilitation competencies in development: processes, challenges and lessons of a learning alliance to develop facilitators for local community engagement. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 11, pp.118-135.

Lefore, N.; Giordano, M.; Ringler, C. and Barron, J. (2019). Sustainable and equitable growth in farmer-led irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa: What will it take? Water Alternatives 12, pp.156-168

Mdee, A., and Harrison, E. (2019). Critical governance problems for farmer-led irrigation: Isomorphic mimicry and capability traps. Water Alternative, 12, pp.30-45.

Mendes, M. D., Paglietti, L., Jackson, D., and Altozano, G.A. (2014). Ghana: Irrigation market brief. FAO Investment Centre. Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4158e.pdf. Accessed date: 18 April 2020. 58 pages

Mensah, H., and Ibrahim, B. (2017). Alternate solutions towards sustainable irrigated agriculture in Ghana: Review of literature. Journal of Agriculture and Sustainability, 10(1), pp.53-79.

Namara E.R., Hope, L., Sarpong, E.O., De Fraitured, C., and Owusu, D. (2014). Adoption patterns and constraints pertaining to small-scale water lifting technologies in Ghana Agricultural Water Management 131 (2014), pp.194-203

Naseem, A., Spielman, D.J., and Omamo, S.W. (2010). Private??sector investment in R&D: a review of policy options to promote its growth in developing??country agriculture. Agribusiness, 26(1), pp.143-173.

Ponnusamy, K. (2013). Impact of public private partnership in agriculture: A review. Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences, 83(8), pp.803-8.

Ragasa, C., Lambrecht, I., and Kufoalor, D.S. (2018). Limitations of contract farming as a pro-poor strategy: the case of maize outgrower schemes in Upper West Ghana. World Development, 102, pp.30-56.

Schut, M., Kamanda, J., Gramzow, A., Dubois, T., Stoian, D., Andersson, J.A., Dror, I., Sartas, M., Mur, R., Kassam, S., Brouwer, H., Devaus, A., Velasco, C., Flor, R.J., Gummert, M., Buizer, D., Mcdougall, C., Davis, K., Homann-kee, S., and Lundy, M. (2019). Innovation platforms in agricultural research for development: Ex-ante appraisal of the purposes and conditions under which innovation platforms can contribute to agricultural development outcomes. Experimental Agriculture, 55(4), pp.575-596.

Swaans, K., Cullen, B., Van Rooyen, A.F., Adekunle, A., Ngwenya, H., Lema, Z., and Nederlof, S. (2013). Dealing with critical challenges in African innovation platforms: Lessons for facilitation. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 9(03), pp.116-135.

Totin, E., Roncoli, C., Traoré, P.S., Somda, J., and Zougmoré, R. (2018). How does institutional embeddedness shape innovation platforms? A diagnostic study of three districts in the Upper West Region of Ghana. NJAS-Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 84, pp.27-40.

Veldwisch, G.J., Venot, J.P., and Komakech, H. (2019). Farmer-led irrigation development in Sub-Saharan Africa: investment, policy engagements and agrarian transformation. Water Alternative, 12(1), pp.1-168.

Woodhouse P., Veldwisch, G.J., Venot, J.P., Brockington, D., Komakech H., and Manjichi, A. (2017). African farmer-led irrigation development: re-framing agricultural policy and investment? The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44:1, pp.213-233.

Downloads

Published

2020-10-01

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2020): The unusual suspect? The private sector in knowledge partnerships for agricultural and rural development

Section

Papers

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Thai Minh, Olufunke Cofie, Nicole Lefore, Petra Schmitter

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The copyright of the articles published in this journal remains the property of the authors. For liability reasons, the title belongs to the Foundation for the Support of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. This journal is currently an open access journal as it has a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access", we support the rights of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles." However, some of the content (2009-2012) is only available on the Taylor and Francis website. Within the next few months, this issue too will become available on the OJS. [1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess