One of the mandates of the Water Management Unit working under Eastern and Southern Africa (ESAf) region at ICRAF is to ensure that water management is incorporated and well-articulated projects. The unit is currently working with Food and Water Security in the Sahel and Horn of Africa, a five-year Programme funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Currently, the Programme is in its inception phase in which Programme partners have conducted characterization studies in five countries that will provide reference for the next phase activities. Specifically, the characterization studies will facilitate the identification of suitable implementation sites within the programme operational areas.
The team visited Tigray region in Ethiopia on 21-27 October 2014, to assess the progress made so far in the characterization studies and quick win activities.
A ‘quick win’ can be defined as an intervention with the potential to generate positive economic impact for farmers and/or the environment. Such quick wins are important as they often don’t demand intensive investments and immediate impacts can be noticed in the short term.
They offer a way of assessing and determining what techniques/interventions work best in operational areas. This way, it can make further scaling up of similar activities in the defined area more successful.
ICRAF and partners planned to undertake quick win activities in order to test implementation of activities using the integrated approach incorporating the four programme pillars: 1) inclusiveness, (2) technical integration of water and soil management interventions, including agroforestry, (3) value chain development, and (4) extension methodologies. The quick win activities will aid the programme in drawing lessons and recommendations on the techniques and approaches to scale up during the implementation phase.
Water Harvesting in Tigray
While at Tigray region, ICRAF and the World Vision Ethiopia (WVE) team, inspected many ‘quick win’ projects that were being implemented. There was notable improvement of access to water for many communities. Existing dams had been rehabilitated and new ones constructed which linked to the incremental improvement of the already treated watersheds.
In one of the sites called Dapetros mini-dam, local government officials as well as the head of the community present, shared accounts of the benefits they have gained from the interventions of the project. It became evident that the community was engaged in rehabilitating the dam which had resulted to great efficiency during the project.
Room for Research
This example raises the question on how quick-wins should be selected in the future. The ICRAF-WMU would label a ‘quick win’ activity as an activity which is directly linked to scalability. In other words, the quick wins should test what techniques can best be implemented on a larger scale and should also take into account the elements of geo-physical and cost-effectiveness in order to assess the placement of certain rainwater harvesting interventions.
The Programme proposal clearly stipulates the value and need for research. Even with the implementation of the ‘quick wins’ the need for partners to work closely together in finding ways of incorporating research into the Programme was apparent.
It is important that the quick wins are well monitored and lessons drawn from them. Despite the site selection criteria on quick wins being unclear, it is evident that many activities are ongoing in Ethiopia. These activities demonstrated that the community involvement is visible and significant for the success of the Programme especially with the high expectations stakeholders have for this initiative.
