Introduction
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-to-date, 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.
Project Objectives
●
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.