From the spate-irrigated lowlands and highlands of Eritrea to center-pivot sugarcane in Mauritius to Feed the Future research projects in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, the key lesson is that the problem is not water! It was everything around it.
Starting in the soil
I didn’t come to irrigation through a boardroom. I came to it through the ground. I trained as a soil and water conservationist, and I learned my first lesson in the highlands and lowlands of Eritrea as an extension agent. The inhabitants of in Eritrea have traditionally practiced various irrigation techniques such as spate irrigation — locally called “jeriff” — for generations, diverting the brief, violent floods that rush down onto their fields. In the coastal areas, only around 14,000 hectares are developed that way, a sliver of what’s possible, but the ingenuity of it stayed with me.
My second lesson took place in the distant island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocea. I worked on irrigation efficiency for a large commercial sugarcane operation running center pivots — machines that traverse the fields, following a programmed schedule, a world away from hand-cut flood channels. The core discipline turned out to be identical: a pivot only earns its cost if the water is matched precisely to the crop and spread evenly. Expensive equipment and automation require even more attention to management. After Mauritius, I spent more than a decade as one of the irrigation experts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), monitoring research projects including the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation (ILSSI), the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), and the work of embedding irrigation into the African Union’s CAADP via the Policy, Evidence, Analytics, Research and Learning (PEARL, implemented by IFPRI).
A fifth of the land, two-fifths of the food
Irrigated farmland is only about a fifth of the world’s cropland, yet it produces roughly 40% of our food, and in water-scarce areas it typically doubles yields compared with rainfed farming (World Bank, 2026d). That headline hides real variation — irrigation supplies more than half of the maize, wheat, and rice grown in China and Egypt, but only 20–40% of U.S. maize (Ai et al., 2024) — but the punchline holds: for much of the world, irrigation is decisive for food security.
Agriculture is the single largest user of freshwater. Yet the map is starkly uneven. Sub-Saharan Africa irrigates only about 6% of its cropland, even as global food demand is set to rise more than 70% by 2050 — when the world will need to feed roughly 10 billion people (World Bank, 2026d). And the stakes are not abstract. In 2025, about 645 million people still faced hunger, 309 million of them in Africa, where more than half the population is moderately or severely food insecure and a healthy diet is now out of reach for two-thirds (FAO et al., 2026). That gap — between what irrigation could grow and what Africa actually harvests — has been the paradox at the center of my career.
What actually makes irrigation work
If I could compress my fieldwork into one sentence: irrigation is not an engineering problem, it’s a systems problem. The pumps almost always work. What fails is everything around them.
I first made this observation watching those Mauritian center pivots, which only paid off with disciplined scheduling and energy management. I witnessed the systemic nature of the problem on two continents. In Bangladesh, with CSISA, some of the technical breakthrough were almost humble, such as a low-lift axial flow pump that used about 40% less fuel than the ones farmers (Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia, n.d.). But the pump wasn’t the lesson; the lesson was what was built around it: local manufacturing, dealer and repair networks, rehabilitated canals, and trained service providers along with rigorously studied agronomic practices and crop breeding. Across sub-Saharan Africa, with ILSSI, the same truth wore a different accent — the strongest model was farmer-led irrigation, where farmers invest in their own solar or motorized pumps because it pays, backed by affordable finance, private supply chains, and deliberate attention to nutrition, gender and groundwater governance (Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation [ILSSI], n.d.).
Irrigation and its systemic operation: The pattern shows up everywhere I look. In northern Nigeria — where under 1% of farmland is irrigated — a World Bank–backed project expanded irrigation across 43,400 hectares, roughly doubled rice yields, and, crucially, built more than 800 Water Users’ Associations to manage the water; it now helps feed about a million people (World Bank, 2025). In Ethiopia, the inclusion of farmers as co-administrators and co-financiers in the building and placement of pumps has yielded better results(World Bank, 2026b). The research says the same thing: irrigation delivers most reliably as an integrated package, and is undercut by weak finance and misgovernance (Mdoda, 2026); for example, Benin’s gains materialized when infrastructure was paired with training and finance (Ahoudjo et al., 2026).
Whether it’s a pivot, a pump, or a canal, the machine is never enough. That is why I advocate for irrigation to be an integral part of national development polices. Unless water is built into the plan, it stays an afterthought.
The opportunity
The upside is enormous. The World Bank estimates that converting suitable rainfed land to irrigation could create hundreds of millions of jobs in sub-Saharan Africa — on the order of four jobs per newly irrigated hectare (World Bank, 2026d). And the capital is beginning to move: Ghana’s 2026 AgriConnect Compact, a roughly $3.5 billion framework targeting millions of jobs, puts irrigation at its core (World Bank, 2026c), while Ethiopia is financing a new generation of climate-resilient irrigation (World Bank, 2026a). Set against a continent where hunger is still measured in the hundreds of millions (FAO et al., 2026), the direction is clear. But the opportunity is captured only by whoever masters the system, not just the hardware — the finance, the markets, the governance, the rights (Mdoda, 2026; Sylla et al., 2026). That’s why I founded Habeerna LLC to continue the treatment of irrigation as a system that integrates agronomy, market analysis, and policy; optimizing water for specific, marketable crops; and deliberately establishing local water governance and securing legal water rights — alongside small-scale, precision, and solar-powered technologies. Please feel free to contact me at biniamiyob@habeerna.com if you have any questions, comments and want to collaborate.