The world marks World Water Day on March 22 amid growing calls for the protection and conservation of water sources to mitigate desertification. Water is life, and nowhere is this as clear as in the role of water in providing nourishment to an ever-growing population.

Families in parts of Rwanda with good access to water – from rainwater harvesting, ground or surface water – are increasingly able to grow more nutritious crops all year round to keep themselves fed and to improve their incomes.

Use of either traditional or modern irrigation methods under a range of irrigation initiatives has so far enabled farm communities to carry on both crop and livestock production unhindered by changes in rainfall, the occurrence of drought and other climate change issues wreaking havoc in areas where farming is largely rainfed.

Irrigation has seen smallholder farmers, who by nature are hardly able to produce everything they need to eat a nutritious diet every day, boost production of selected priority crops under the Rwanda land consolidation programme. They are growing staples such as rice, maize, beans and soya, selling the excess and buying what they cannot directly produce.

The government of Rwanda and its development partners are promoting irrigation initiatives to boost productivity, as well as access to healthy and nutritious foods and foster livelihood for resilient communities.

The successes of these initiatives have seen families keep malnutrition at bay, benefitting thousands of smallholder farmers under the Nasho solar-powered irrigation project in arid Kirehe District of Eastern Province, for example.

Similarly, farmers on some 1,086 hectares who received support under the Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Food Security Project (SAIP) in the west of Karongi District have seen how leveraging water resources boost access to nutritious food.

The support they received in terms of rainwater harvesting, establishing dams and pumping systems enabled crop production for the whole dry season.

Success stories have also been documented where citizens live in proximity to marshlands in both rural and urban settings of the country.

However, irrigation schemes are only possible with rich groundwater sources whose existence is continually threatened by climate change and pollution. It therefore falls on everyone, not just farmers and governments, to protect water sources for the survival of mankind.

Without enough water for irrigation, access to nutritious food will remain a problem amid reports that 33 per cent of children under five suffer from stunting in Rwanda. There is a need to scale up schemes that allow rural smallholders farmers to deal with prevailing limitations around food access.

Furthermore, it’s very crucial to engage both men and women in interventions that promote optimal nurturing care practices in rural families.

In view of the climate-induced toll on the agriculture sector and with 84 percent of Rwandan farmers owning less than 0.5 hectares, according to the latest data by the National Institute of Statistics (NISR), prevailing food access problems are exacerbated by the fact that farming remains predominantly rainfed.

The NISR’s latest Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis (CFSVA), published in January indicated that only 9.2 per cent of households use some form of irrigation.

Therefore, there is a need to extend support to vulnerable farmers in rural areas to boost uptake of improved water use for food production especially when it comes to equipment acquisition, skills to use irrigation machinery as well as cost of running and maintaining the systems.

It is reassuring to see that Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB) has been stepping in to subsidize upfront costs for irrigation machinery and accessories, which has largely benefitted commercial farmers.

However, at policy level, we need to see trained personnel that can invest in capacity building for smallholder farmers, and for agronomists at decentralized level, to be able to offer adequate support to establish, run and maintain the irrigation or rainwater harvesting systems.

And, most importantly, we must all interrogate our water use practices so that we keep the resource available and accessible for generations to come. Think about it the next time you are tempted to dump waste into a river or cut down trees in a water catchment area.

Happy World Water Day!

Yves Jean Ntimugura is an Access to Nutritious Food Fellow at African Food Fellowship.