In Accra, Ghana, most homes
do not have indoor plumbing or sewage systems. Instead,
households dispose of waste into the same ditches and
streams that urban farmers use to irrigate the crops
they sell at local markets. The use of wastewater on
farms presents a significant health risk and has been
banned by the government. But because many farmers don’t
have access to clean sources of water, they lack other
options for irrigating their crops.
“Ideally we would start at the city level to address
wastewater treatment through infrastructure,” says
Ben Keraita, an irrigation and water engineer and
researcher with IWMI. “But there is no money or
support for a big project like that, so we start
with the farmers to find affordable, small, and
simple ways to reduce the risk of contamination.”
Starting with the farmers is critical for another
reason, Keraita explains. “There are too many
different kinds of interventions when it comes to
reducing the risk of contamination from waste water,
and farmers do not react well to having new
techniques pushed upon them.” Instead, Keraita and
other project coordinators used their existing
relationships with local farmers to call a meeting
to discuss the problem and hear potential solutions
from the farmers themselves. “Farmers know that the
waste water is a problem and have lots of their own
ideas about how to address it.”
Keraita and his colleagues created a list of
innovations suggested by farmers and then introduced
a few of their own, exposing the farmers to best
practices from around the world. “Nothing we
introduced was invented on the spot, and many are
simple enough to be adopted immediately, like
avoiding stepping into irrigation water and stirring
up sediment that might contain contaminants by
putting down a plank to walk on instead,” Keraita
explains. Farmers are then asked to volunteer to
adopt the practices that they think will be most
effective, keeping track of their work daily so that
an assessment can be made of the innovation at
harvest time.
“If farmers don’t like a technique then we suggest
doing another trial with a new technique,” Keraita
says. “And we invite other farmers to view the
harvest and the weighing of the crops so that they
can give each other feedback and learn from the
experiments of others.”
Based on these group discussions and trials, urban
farmers in Accra are now irrigating with water
collected in “waste sedimentation ponds”—ponds built
specifically to allow sediment to sink to the bottom
so farmers can irrigate with the cleaner surface
water—and with simple containers of filtered water.
Some are now also using drip irrigation from kits
produced by
International Development Enterprises (IDE),
allowing them to use water more precisely and to
conserve clean water (see also
Slow and Steady Irrigation Wins the Race).
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