Challenge Program on Water and Food

An integrated approach to green and blue water management from farmer’s field to river basin scale is required to promote and upscale rural livelihood improvements developed or promoted in the project. This cannot be achieved though the introduction of innovations alone, but requires the building of appropriate capacity in land and water management at all the scales at which interventions are implemented, or management decisions taken. Too often capacity-building is seen as an add-on to research: a follow-up activity in which the main researchers are uninvolved or uninterested. As an alternative, the approach in this project is to integrate capacity building into the research activities from the planning stage onwards.
 
The project goal was to contribute to improved rural livelihoods of poor smallholder farmers through the development of an IWRM framework for increased productive use of green and blue water flows and risk management for drought and dry-spell mitigation at all scales in the Limpopo basin. The project concluded in August 2009 and the final report is here. 

Phase 2 of the Challenge Program on Water and Food in the Limpopo Basin is structured into five projects. These are:
    Project L1 - Targeting and scaling out
    Project L2 - Small scale infrastructure
    Project L3 - Farm systems and risk management
    Project L4 - Water governance
    Project L5 - Learning for innovation and adaptive management (Coordination project)