Ethiopia - Gov't to Start Irrigation Project On 200,000 Hectares of Land

March 24, 2005 Posted to the web March 25, 2005
Dagnachew TekluAddis Ababa

The Ethiopian government has announced plans to undertake irrigation projects on 200,000 hectares of land as part of the country's food security program.
The announcement was made yesterday during the second day of marking this year's 'Water Day'. Ato Shiferaw Jarso, Minister of Water Resources said that the full development of 97,000 hectares of irrigation project was well underway in the Awash and Koqa basins.
The 90,000 hectares of the total irrigation project is in construction in Awash while the 7,000 hectares is in Koqa.

"In order to ensure food security and enhance our economic development, irrigation development is being given more attention," Shiferaw said.
He also indicated that identification of other similar projects has also been carried out in order to scale up medium and large scale irrigation throughout the country.
According to available information, Ethiopia is endowed with the potential of huge water resource, with 122 billion m3 annual surfaces runoff and 2.9 billion m3 of ground water.
However, the country's water resource has contributed little to the country's socio-economic development where the average access to clean and safe water supply stands at 34 percent, which is said to be very low even by Sub Sahara African countries standards.
It was also learnt that the area of land under irrigation was only five percent of the potential while that of hydropower only two percent. Ethiopia's water resource potential is said to be the second in Africa.

"The major reasons for this under-utilization of the country's potential are capacity limitations and poor management of water resources," according to a report.
It is projected to increase the current 34 percent water coverage to 63 percent as part of the country's move towards the Millennium Development Goals.

International organizations, donors and the government, NGOs and the private sectors are expected to increase financing for the sector to reach the required goal by 2015.