Advancing Water Innovative Technologies- WIT

Brief

The Water Innovations Technology (WIT) project is a 5-year USAID-funded program designed to catalyze conservation in Jordan. Jordan is the fifth most water-poor country on earth and urgent action is required to make better use of existing water resources due to economic, population, and climate pressures. The WIT will contribute to the overall objective of conserving water in Jordan, through the adoption of water-saving technologies and techniques. To achieve this, WIT project is collaborating with market actors to help them promote modern irrigation technologies and techniques. The program is seeking to enhance the technical capacities of irrigation technology market actors so they can provide pre- and post-sale services and advisory services, with the long-term result being improved on-farm irrigation system efficiencies. To achieve its goals, WIT has engaged several irrigation supply companies and provided them with support to provide farmers with improved irrigation systems on all or a part of their farms.

Through its work-todate, WIT has found that additional follow-up with farms is necessary to ensure proper installation and maintenance of the systems. At the same time, there is a recognized gap in the knowledge of young agricultural engineers around irrigation. Therefore, Methods for Irrigation and Agriculture (MIRRA) will support the WIT team in achieving these goals by 1) providing guidance to suppliers by partnering on quality control checks of the farm installations, and 2) leading a program to provide field-based experiential training to entry-level agricultural engineers.

MIRRA’s work is generally supporting the irrigation supply companies partnering with WIT with the objective of ensuring optimal design, installation, and operation of irrigation systems at all WIT-supported farms.

●        Provision of farm-level irrigation system quality assurance for WIT by working closely with suppliers to evaluate system design, installation, and maintenance on all farms directly or indirectly supported by WIT, ensuring that they are completed to a high standard and the suppliers have the ability to provide this quality assurance in the future; and

●        Completion of field-based training of recently graduated agricultural engineers so they can have in-depth knowledge of irrigation system optimization and best practices.