connecting investments in large scale irrigation to gendered reallocations of water and  labor in the Eastern Nile basin

Introduction :

Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt all have ambitious plans to increase irrigated agriculture in the Eastern Nile Basin. Planned projects will imply re-distributions of Nile flows and therefore affect (capabilities for) social and ecological resilience of local populations and ecosystems. As the Nile basin is rapidly closing, these redistributions will have trade-offs and be contested, with some being favored more than others. Improving the ability of decision makers, investors and communities to make informed decisions about the  social and ecological benefits and costs of new investments, and about how these are (to be) divided across scales and (groups of) people, is therefore of crucial importance.

Project activities

The project is currently running  in three study sites, mainly:

1. Dal Agricultural Scheme, Sudan
2. Salam Canal Project, Egypt
3. Tana Beles Sugar Cane, Ethiopia

The main activities include Water Accounting Analyses  (WA+), Soical Impacts and  Ecosystems Services and Resilience .

Objectives

Overall ambition of the project:

To make Water Accounting  contextually relevant by including social (including gender) and ecological dimensions….

Partners

The lead institute is the UNESCO-IHE Institute. Partners are: IWMI(Cairo and Addis Ababa), HRC-Sudan and Ethiopian Forum for Social Studies (FSS). The inception workshop was hosted by the HRC-Sudan during 9-11 March 2015.

Methodology

For the case study areas inclusive water accounting will be carried out according to the four steps displayed in the right figure.Satellite data and SEBAL model are the main used techniques.

Outputs

Land use/cover, ET, Water Productivity and Biomass maps were produced for the three case studies (Actual ET maps are shown in figures below).

Actual ET (mm/day)

partners