Malawi National Irrigation Policy.

Malawi National Irrigation Policy is a cross-sectoral policy designed to contribute to sustainable national economic growth and development through enhanced irrigated agriculture production and productivity. The expected policy outcomes are: Increased irrigated agriculture production and productivity for local and export use using irrigation technologies that take into account climate change; Improved national and household incomes, food and nutritional security; Improved irrigation service delivery; Increased employment opportunities; and Enhanced land and water productivity through sustainable land tenure arrangements, catchment management and water harvesting.
The policy aims at making agriculture more sustainable through focusing on three priority areas namely, Sustainable Irrigation Development, Sustainable Irrigation Management and Capacity Development. In the area of Sustainable Irrigation Development, efforts will focus on increasing the land under sustainable irrigation farming and optimizing investment in irrigation development. Specifically, the strategy entails identification of areas with potential for irrigated agriculture, conduct of feasibility studies and preparation of designs for irrigation schemes, developing and rehabilitating infrastructure for irrigation, establishing and operationalizing the Irrigation Fund, and encouraging public private partnership arrangements.
In the area of Sustainable Irrigation Management efforts will focus on ensuring that catchment conservation measures are vigorously pursued, development of farmer organisations and technical and administrative empowerment become an inte¬gral part of ensuring community participation, alternatives to handling and marketing of farmers produce are explored for maximum profitability of irrigated crops, extension services for irrigated agriculture are strengthened, and beneficiary communities are supported where major rehabilitation or upgrading of irrigation infra-structure are required.
These efforts especially those focused on community participation will also help in reducing rural poverty through equitable use and sustainable management of irrigation schemes.
The area of capacity development will involve development of training programmes to address capacity gaps in the public and private sectors, development of irrigation standards, code of practice and irrigation development guidelines, ensure greater presence of irrigation experts at district or lower levels, a robust extension system, and registration of irrigation service providers (i.e. consultants and contractors) with relevant professional bodies.
The Ministry responsible for Irrigation will coordinate and facilitate the implementation of the Policy with relevant stakeholders having varying responsibilities in the implementation plan. The implementation will be monitored through a monitoring and evaluation system with necessary feedback mechanism so as to effectively track sector performance indicators. Joint Sector Review meetings will be used for information sharing and effective engagement of stakeholders in irrigation development. The lessons learnt in the projects will be incorporated in future project as part of evaluation. The Ministry responsible for irrigation will coordinate and lead the monitoring and evaluation process of the Policy and ensure timely reporting and dissemination of results. An Irrigation Monitoring and Evaluation Systems Report will be prepared annually.