Digital innovation boosts water, crop yields – Dr Seid

The Project Lead for Digital Innovation for Water Secure Africa (DIWASA) for Ethiopia and East Africa, Dr Abdulkarim Seid, has stated that digital innovation is bridging the gap between water management and agricultural productivity across Africa.

That, he said, was because while data collection previously required manual field stations, satellite and drone technology now allowed remote monitoring.

Dr Seid, who was speaking on the sidelines of this year’s Pan-African Symposium on Shaping Africa’s Digital Water Future in Accra last Wednesday, said the new challenge, however, was capacity, pointing out that although satellite data was abundant and largely in the public domain, most African countries lacked the capacity to use it.

The two-day event, which was organised by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), under the DIWASA project, with support from Helmsley Charitable Trust, was on the theme: “From data to decisions. From innovation to scale”.

Dr Seid said DIWASA, which had been running for over three years, was created to address critical data gaps in water management by leveraging advances in earth observation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other digital innovation tools.

He said the project had already generated many products, developed a number of tools and trained hundreds of people.

Dr Seid said agriculture, which consumed most of the water extracted from groundwater and rivers, remained the least monitored sector in many sub-Saharan African countries.

“You do not have a lot of data on how much water we are actually using in agriculture.

If you do not know how much you are using, you do not know the water efficiency and water productivity.

Without it, how do you design a project? How do you manage irrigation systems?”

Dr Seid asked, adding that DIWASA could fill that gap through awareness creation, capacity building and co-developing end-user-focused applications with users.

Speaking to the case of Ghana, he cited the Botanga Irrigation Scheme where DIWASA was working with the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority (GIDA), using earth observation data, saying that the project generated information to improve water management, with a dashboard, integrating all data to be handed over to GIDA.

Dr Seid said DIWASA initially aimed to reach 25,000 people but had already surpassed 100,000 users through its Africa Geoportal where continental data was visualised online.

“Over 1,000 people have been trained face-to-face in specific applications,” he stated, adding, “For smallholder farmers who are often digitally cut off, the strategy is to work through government extension agents who translate data into actionable advice.”

He said the approach was already used in Ethiopia and must be expanded massively across the continent.

The Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, John Dumelo, said water security remained a critical factor of concern for Ghanaian farmers as it directly influenced when to plant, what to grow, how much land to cultivate and whether there would be return on investment at the end of the season.

He said Ghana’s ability to advance agricultural development, therefore, depended in part on how well it managed its water resources, indicating that rainfall variability, drought and flooding across African communities made the responsibility increasingly demanding.

The Global Director of Water Data Science from the IWMI, Professor Ian Overton, welcoming the delegates, said Africa’s water demand was rising while rainfall had become less predictable, floods and droughts were growing more severe and water quality declining.

He said for far too long African water decisions had been made with too little data, with gauges that had stopped working, records never shared, and extreme events never prepared.