by Edward Mishaud

28 May 2003

Bonn, Germany: Tanzanian farmers on the southern shores of Lake Victoria are gearing up to capture clean wind and solar energy to drive the pumps necessary to water their crops.

With the help of Nepalese UN Volunteer Prashanna Shrestha, farmers in the region are turning to mother nature to pump the water they need to irrigate their land. Instead of using diesel-powered water pumps, Prashanna designed eight solar and windmill energy generating irrigation projects in four districts. The irrigation pumps extract water out of Lake Victoria to a central distilling tank, then onwards to several storage tanks where it will flow by gravity through canals to farmers' fields.

"The pumps will enable the farmers to grow better quality [crops] and in some project areas farmers will get totally new crops," says Prashanna. "Fields that were once partially cultivated will now have enough water to be fully cultivated."

He estimates that 400 farmers will benefit from the project. A pilot wind-powered pump is already pumping water to the storage tank. Workers are now building water distribution canals to finish the job by mid-May.

Prashanna started his work in Tanzania through the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme in July 2001. Prior to coming to Africa, he worked in Nepal as an irrigation specialist with the national Department of Irrigation, and before that he was stationed in Cambodia as a UN Volunteer working with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and International Labour Organization (ILO) on a joint irrigation project. Currently he is responsible for monitoring, supervising and assisting in the construction of the solar and windmill energy generating irrigation projects.

In addition to providing the farmers with an energy source that is clean and renewable, he train the farmers so that they can take an active part in maintaining the pumps long after he and the other specialists have left. He and four district coordinators are working with a number of community-based organizations (CBOs) composed of farmers and other stakeholders to educate them on the system and what is required to keep it running. So far, he says, the training programme is going quite smoothly and the farmers are becoming more and more comfortable with the technology.

"Prashanna's great contribution has been reflected in two ways," said Nehemiah Murusuri, the UN Volunteer's supervisor under the UNDP project. "First, he has helped farmers to design irrigation systems that are low cost. Most irrigation projects are high cost and therefore unaffordable to the poor. Second, through capacity building initiatives to the farmers themselves and their irrigation technicians. Farmers are very happy with the irrigation systems that use renewable energy technologies. Farmers like this technology because it has almost zero operational and maintenance costs. It is also environmentally benign."

Provision of water for domestic purposes contributes to the attainment of Millennium Development Goal 7 that aims at reducing by half by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, Mr. Murusuri noted.

TICAD was launched in 1993 through the joint effort of the Government of Japan, the United Nations and the Global Coalition for Africa. The World Bank joined the TICAD co-organizers in 2000. The primary functions of TICAD are: promotion of high-level policy dialogue between African leaders and their partners, and mobilization of support for Africa's own development efforts.