In the highlands of Karuzi Province, Burundi, smallholder farmers are increasingly exposed to prolonged dry spells, erratic rainfall, and fragile water-sharing arrangements between neighbouring cooperatives. Scarce and contested water resources not only undermine agricultural productivity, but also place a disproportionate burden on women and girls and have repeatedly given rise to disputes over access to springs and irrigation supplies. The Digital Peace Water (DPW) project addresses this dual challenge of climate stress and social tension by combining climate-resilient water infrastructure with transparent, data-driven governance.

DPW is a Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) Technical Assistance under the UNEP-managed AFCIA programme. The project is implemented by a consortium led by Zephyr Consulting, together with FutureWater, sensors.AFRICA (Code for Africa) and the Burundian NGO APRN/BEPB. It deploys solar-powered groundwater pumping, centralized storage and a network of IoT sensors, linked to a community-accessible dashboard that supports adaptive water allocation. By making water availability and use visible to all parties, the system is designed to reduce competition over shared resources, build trust between cooperatives, and serve as a replicable model for climate-resilient, conflict-sensitive water management in the region.

FutureWater contributes the hydrological and agronomic backbone of the system. Building on its experience with Croptimal, the satellite-based irrigation advisory service deployed in Rwanda, Zambia, Ghana and Egypt, FutureWater develops the allocation logic that translates groundwater levels, storage status, rainfall forecasts and crop water demand into operational decisions on the DPW dashboard. This includes defining the threshold-based regimes that govern abstraction under normal and dry-season conditions, peer-reviewing the hydraulic design of the borehole-and-tank systems, and analysing climate and hydrological data to inform sustainable pumping rates and storage sizing. FutureWater also supports the climate risk assessment for the pilot sites and the design of the dry-season scenarios that will be evaluated during implementation.

A second strand of FutureWater’s contribution is capacity building. In close cooperation with APRN/BEPB and the local Water Management Committees, FutureWater delivers training on data interpretation, water planning and the use of the DPW dashboard, ensuring that cooperative members, women- and youth-led groups, and local authorities can independently operate the system beyond the project duration. The pilot phase will be implemented at three sites in Karuzi, representing different hydrogeological and landscape conditions, with the explicit ambition of providing a blueprint for scale-up across Burundi and comparable contexts.

The Nile Basin Decision Support System (NBI-DSS) will provide the necessary knowledge base and analytical tools to support the planning of cooperative joint projects and the management of the shared Nile Basin water resources on an equitable, efficient and sustainable manner. FutureWater was asked to support this NBI-DSS and to undertake preliminary data collection and compilation.

Details

The developed data base has two main components: spatial data and point data. Regarding the spatial data the following data have been made available

  • Land cover
  • Soils
  • Vegetation Indices
  • Precipitation FEWS

These data are available over the entire Nile Basin and include a extensive set of attributes. Data have been quality controlled and is ready to apply in the DSS and can be used for various types of hydrological models.

The point data includes over 20 million records from various sources included global and local data sets. Data are stored in PostGreSQL. The data can be considered as the most complete hydro-meteorological dataset available for the Nile so far.

The countries included in the Nile Equatorial Lake sub-basins face an ever increasing pressure on land and water resources, together with rapid population growth. As a result, food production is one of the main concerns and priorities of policymakers in the area. Irrigation and improved water resources management have the potential to boost agricultural productivity in the area, currently almost entirely rainfed. Irrigated crop yields are much higher than rainfed yields, which means that there is a high potential to increase food production in the area.

FutureWater, in collaboration with WaterWatch, will assess the irrigation potential of seven Nile countries in order to fill gaps in the NBI and member country information based on agricultural use. This study consists of several consecutive steps, in which hydrological modelling, the use of remote sensed data, ArcGIS analyses, consultation workshops and meetings form the core of the project.

The specific objectives of this project are:

  • Determine the irrigation potential of the proposed countries considering the physical resources of ‘soil’ and ‘water’, combined with the irrigation water requirements as determined by the cropping patterns and climate
  • Provide a preliminary assessment of probable environmental and socio-economic constraints to be considered to ensure sustainable use of physical resources within the Nile basin
  • Indicate the required resources for the preparation and investment phase

NEL countries

Maps

The assessment of the Irrigation Potential study resulted in a irrigation suitability map. This map can be downloaded as jpeg or as GeoTIFF. Click on the links below to download the suitable format: