Posted on September, 3, 2021 at 10:01 am
The government plans to construct water facilities for agricultural production in all the parishes across the country to improve livelihoods in rural areas through commercial farming.
Mr Alfred Okot Okidi, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Water and Environment, told Daily Monitor on Sunday that the intervention would be implemented in a phased manner.
The project aims at increasing storage volumes of water for crop irrigation, livestock and aquaculture in the country’s 10,594 parishes.
“The idea is that at every parish we should have a facility for water for production which acts as a nucleus for that parish because that is where you can do commercial agriculture, aquaculture and livestock watering,” he said.
Mr Okot said the facilities would act as a hub for development in rural areas.
He said if farmers have water on their farms, at least 60 per cent of their problems in production would be addressed.
He added that the intervention was already being implemented through construction of small and medium irrigation schemes, earth dams, valley tanks, boreholes and bulk water schemes.
Mr Okot also said government had already constructed several irrigation schemes under the Lira-based water for production facility.
The regional facility, which was established in 2016, serves 28 districts in Lango, Acholi, and West Nile sub-regions.
“We have successfully completed a number of irrigation schemes. We have done 20 demonstration schemes and 10 are under construction and the facility in the north has also done the supervision of the construction of three large scale irrigation schemes,” Mr Okot said. He added that 12 other facilities were under construction.
He also said farmers were being trained to use the facilities.
“We also train farmers in commercial production because you can have the water but when to use the water to what quantity, or what additional boost you need to provide for the crops is also necessary,” Mr Okot said.
“We also support them in raising the seedlings so that they have quality inputs that they can use on their gardens for production purposes. Our experience shows that when they embrace what we teach them, production goes up in terms of quantity and revenue three to six times,” added the permanent secretary.
Mr Okot said the government would also roll out the public private partnership model to share the development of the water facilities.
“We are very grateful to Gulu local government and city council for availing us land where these equipment are going to be stored and maintained,” Mr Okot said, adding that community groups would only provide fuel.
The ministry is also in the final stages of designing the Unyama irrigation scheme to be constructed in Gulu next year.
Mr Denis Okech, the former chairman of Ojwii “B” Village, Aleka Sub-county in Oyam District, welcomed the initiative, saying many households cannot afford two meals a day due to drought.
Uganda has irrigation potential of 3.03 million hectares. But as of 2017, the irrigation coverage was at 0.5 per cent. The total land under irrigation stood at around 15,000 hectares countrywide.
Source: The Monitor