Irrigation and Watershed Management

Given the potential for agricultural productivity gains in the large rice producing areas of Madagascar and their contribution to the country’s national development priorities, and the recognition of the need for an integrated approach to irrigation development, the GOM, in collaboration with the donor community, seeks to develop a national program for integrated watershed management and irrigation promotion. The program will adopt a long-term perspective, reconciling the economic growth imperative with the imperative to ensure for sustainable management of land and water resources.The project’s development objective is to alleviate rural poverty and promote alternative livelihood strategies by increasing productivity and income in a number of high-potential irrigated zones through infrastructure development, policy and institutional development, and sustainable land and water resources management under an integrated WS-II approach. GEF’s co-financing of the incremental costs of sustainable land management (SLM) activities in the highly fragile sub-zones of two or three targeted watershed areas will help to pilot this new programmatic WS-II approach, such that the economic, social, and ecological dimensions of land degradation are fully integrated into project interventions.. In order to achieve these aims, GEF incremental activities will be fully blended with the first phase of this APL-structured project (2006-2011). Impacts will be carefully monitored in order to compile lessons learned and to facilitate replication to other project areas/watersheds, as well as to promote scale-up through other projects falling under the umbrella of the National WS-II program.Global environmental benefits will accrue from preserving ecosystem integrity and productivity in the priority watershed areas through the control and prevention of land degradation. GEF incremental investments aimed at reducing erosion, sedimentation, water run-off, flooding, and soil infertility, will also contribute to ameliorating the livelihoods of the rural populations in the targeted areas.