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Le déficit de maintenance est un problème récurrent dans la plupart des grands périmètres irrigués. Cela concerne donc également l'Office du Niger, au Mali. Pour traiter cette question, une approche participative a été utilisée pendant deux ans au niveau d'une maille hydraulique comprenant un canal secondaire et des canaux tertiaires, avec les agriculteurs de deux villages. Les agriculteurs ont été largement impliqués dans la co‐construction de solutions et leur mise en oeuvre. Cette approche a nécessité de nombreuses rencontres et des discussions avec les acteurs à travers deux forums: une Communauté de Pratique (CoP) au niveau local, et un forum des acteurs (LPA) pour les niveaux régional et national. Cette approche a permis une amélioration significative de la maintenance des canaux et l'efficience de l'eau d'irrigation. Selon les agriculteurs, "bien que l'approche soit très contraignante, car non conforme à nos habitudes de réunion et de partage de connaissances, elle est sans aucun doute très avantageuse car elle nous met au centre de la prise de décision".

SI; International audience; Boosting the productivity of smallholder farming systems continues to be a major need in Africa. Challenges relating to how to improve irrigation are multi‐factor and multisectoral, and they involve a broad range of actors who must interact to reach decisions collectively. We provide a systematic reflection on findings from the research project EAU4Food, which adopted a transdisciplinary approach to irrigation for food security research in five case studies in Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, South Africa and Tunisia. The EAU4Food experiences emphasize that actual innovation at irrigated smallholder farm level remains limited without sufficient improvement of the enabling environment and taking note of the wider political economy environment. Most project partners felt at the end of the project that the transdisciplinary approach has indeed enriched the research process by providing different and multiple insights from actors outside the academic field. Local capacity to facilitate transdisciplinary research and engagement with practitioners was developed and could support the continuation and scaling up of the approach. Future projects may benefit from a longer time frame to allow for deeper exchange of lessons learned among different stakeholders and a dedicated effort to analyse possible improvements of the enabling environment from the beginning of the research process. © 2020 The Authors. Irrigation and Drainage published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Commission for Irrigation and Drainage

• Investment projects in irrigable land have been developed at large scale in West Africa since 2008.

Erratum paru dans Agricultural Water Management (2013) 127 p. 124-126; International audience; This paper reports on an experiment undertaken in the Office du Niger irrigation scheme (100,000 ha) in Mali, where the unprecedented development of irrigation driven by large scale investors is dramatically increasing uncertainty surrounding future water management. Coping with future uncertainty in irrigated systems is essential but existing approaches based on scenarios and decision support systems are mainly expert-driven, making them difficult for local users to understand and use on their own. The aim of this study was to design a participatory approach to help local and national stakeholders understand the possible future consequences for water management of scenarios they had built themselves in previous workshops. A role playing game called FOWIS (Future of water in irrigated systems) was designed for this purpose. Two groups (decision makers and local actors) took part and played the roles of family farmers, large scale investors, or the manager of the irrigation scheme. Playing FOWIS increased the players' awareness of each others' strategies and of land development issues, crop choices, and water management. In the local actors' group, applying land development strategies and choosing crops while failing to account for the inevitable increase in water demand led to serious water crises: total demand exceeded water availability by 75%, and the indicator of adequacy dropped to 0.5 for many players. In the decision makers' group, applying a collective strategy to limit water demand, as stipulated in their best case scenario, resulted in an equitable water supply. In this paper, we show how the game enabled participants to understand the interdependencies between future land development, crop choices, and water management, and, in addition, helped them design innovative strategies to limit water demand or to allocate water fairly. Indirectly, it also led them to question their current practices, choices and strategies that would have been impossible in the current context of open tensions concerning land and water allocation. The FOWIS experiment also provided useful information for the further development of non-computer-assisted role playing games in highly uncertain contexts, which is the case of most irrigated systems in developing countries. RPGs that take place in a virtual world could increase stakeholders' capacities to take action with respect to real world issues. (Résumé d'auteur)

Food security is a major priority of the most Sahelian governments. With the cyclic droughts, irrigation has shown the potential of ensuring self sufficiency in food production. Unfortunately, soils of irrigated areas in Sub Sahara African countries have continued to be degraded as a result of poor irrigation management practices. In the “Office du Niger” zones, for example, producers and extension workers are concerned about emerging soil degradation symptoms such as salinisation/alkalinisation or sodisation. Whereas the above problems require urgent attention, the phenomenon has been treated as localised and therefore not very important. From 1995 to 1999, studies were conducted by “the Pole regional de recherche sur les Systemes Irrigues (PSI)” which was a regional networking project, to determine the nature, importance and dynamics of soil degradation processes in irrigated zones of Mali