Synthesis of research issues and capacity building in water and land resources management in Ethiopia

This paper presents an overview and synthesis of the key research and capacity building issues arising from the workshop presentations and the papers. Three days of intensive deliberations by professionals from various research, development and governmental organizations, and of diverse disciplines, backgrounds and nationalities have clearly acknowledged that water management issues remain very crucial for poverty alleviation and rural development in Ethiopia the overwhelming proportion of the population depends on smallholder agricultural production, which is highly constrained by water availability (absence of perennial rivers, high spatial and temporal availability of rainfall, etc.). This situation, over the years, has generated a critical need for efficient water and land management to reduce production risks and hazards, and enhance stable agricultural and livestock production. Recent decades have witnessed various efforts in the area of irrigation and supplementary irrigation (and other development initiatives), employing various water harvesting technologies, construction of micro dams, diversions structures, etc., which were largely combined with traditional yield-enhancing methods to facilitate sustainable smallholder agricultural production.Most of these efforts did not only fall short of their desired objectives of improving smallholder production conditions but also generated a host of other problems which aggravated smallholder production conditions: the large scale irrigation schemes (e.g. Awash Basin and elsewhere) resulted in secondary soil salinization where large tracts of land have gone out of production; the spontaneous construction of micro-dams across the country (especially in Tigray) is associated with human and livestock health hazards that in some cases has resulted into abandonment of the dams; the production potential of extensive watersheds remain largely unexploited or inappropriately utilized, resulting in extensive degradation of fragile lands, and so on. The potential for effectively integrating crops and livestock management in the context of growing water in complementary crop-livestock systems remains largely unexploited, especially from the perspective of efficient water and land utilization. The limited success of most of the technologies in Ethiopia calls attention to a dire need for research and capacity building to understand the complex issues of water and land management, so as to enhance national and local capacity to deal with water and land management issues to enhance food security, poverty alleviation and national economic development.