IRES Track-1: Sustainable Water Resource Management in Eastern Nile Basin Countries: What works? What needs to be improved?

Although Africa is considered the future breadbasket of the world, it currently remains a net food importer primarily due to inefficient agricultural water management. The program will contribute to improving the efficiency of agricultural water management through performance evaluation of current water resource management projects, identifying critical bottlenecks and opportunities, and proposing appropriate solutions.

The program will use the food-energy-water-livelihood nexus approach, which is the state-of-the-art approach for water resource management that takes into account the co-benefits and tradeoffs in managing interconnected resources (land, water, and energy). The program will train U.S. students in multidisciplinary and community-based research in water resources, agriculture and climate, and help advance their understanding of agricultural water management issues in developing countries.

U.S. students, mentored by international researchers, will undertake practical student-led projects in Gezira Irrigation Project (Sudan), Nyanza-23 Irrigation Project (Rwanda), and Meila & Haiba Irrigation Projects (Ethiopia). Students will be trained in all aspects of research (from proposal preparation, to implementation, and communication), and involved in co-academic activities, such as, social activities with local communities and stakeholders, and visits to key cultural, touristic, and educational sites.

U.S. students will study water resource management issues in the Eastern Nile Basin countries from the food-energy-water-livelihood nexus perspective, using irrigation projects as case studies. The proposed research examines the linkages, trade-offs, and co-benefits among the nexus components, and propose nexus-based solutions to improve agricultural water resource management.

The program represents a partnership between University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Hydraulic Research Center in Sudan, University of Rwanda, and Mekelle University. Over three years, a total of 18 students (12 undergraduates and 6 graduates) from U.S. institutions, including underrepresented colleges and universities, will participate in one-year of training structured around an 8-week Summer research in Sudan (year 1), Rwanda (year 2), and Ethiopia (year 3), with Spring preparation and Fall follow up.

During Spring, students will enroll in a seminar course jointly delivered by the participating faculty mentors. During Summer, students will go to East Africa for eight weeks to undertake student-led projects. Examples of student projects include: understanding the dynamics between water supply and demand, characterizing water footprint and productivity, quantifying the impact of access to irrigation water on irrigator’s food and livelihood security, assessing water quality and sedimentation, and developing pilot crowdsourcing project for data collection and dissemination.

During Fall, students will continue to do their research culminating in undergraduate senior/Honors thesis or Master’s thesis. Then, students will present their research work at an international scientific conference, such as, American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting. The intellectual merit of this work lies in the integration of field data, remote sensing, and modeling to understand relationships between the food, energy, water, and livelihood nexus components.

The project specifically addresses the following science questions: (1) What are the nexus hotspots and key interactions in the social and ecological dynamics of food, water, and livelihood systems at multiple scales and levels? (2) In what ways can we extend methodologies traditionally used to analyze water resource systems to nexus systems? (3) What nexus-based solutions (technological, management, governance, and marketing) are needed to improve current water productivity and to guide future new developments? Results will be disseminated through pilot crowdsourcing project, policy briefs, scientific presentations in the USA and Eastern Nile basin countries, and peer-reviewed publications.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.