Submitted by Tammy Erann Soussan, Project Coordinator and Dr. Ram Fishman, Professor of Economics
The Challenge
Take part in a groundbreaking, large-scale effort to spread Israeli drip irrigation in West Africa - the biggest drip irrigation project to date. The project is a partnership between MASHAV, Italian and Senegalese governments that will implement the TIPA model of drip irrigation in about 70 villages in Senegal (around 5,000 farmers). The goal is no less than to show the path towards a large-scale transformation of West African agriculture. Water is scarce in west Africa. Moreover, farmers (often women) spend many hard hours carrying it in buckets from wells to their fields. Drip irrigation can enable them to dramatically expand vegetable cultivation outside the rainy season and free up lots of precious time and labor. But drip is not cost effective for smallholder farmers with tiny parcels of land. The TIPA model aims to solve this by bringing farmers together in groups that share the equipment. The major potential challenge is to help these groups work together and act collectively to invest in the repair and maintenance of their shared drip irrigation equipment, avoiding a kind of "prisoner's dilemma".
Research has shown that frequent communication can help people work together and coordinate. This is where the solution can come in. We need a communication solution that can utilize simple GSM (not smart) phone to help farmers' coordinate and cooperate around the payment of common bills and the collective selling of their produce. For example, when it's time to pay the group's monthly bill, to make members aware of who has paid their part and who has not. Or when it's time to collect all the produce together to bargain a better price, farmers should know that their peers have put their part in. A solution of this kind can be important in many other contexts even beyond drip irrigation - it can have a giant impact.
Social Contextual Consideration
The common spoken languages in Senegal are French and the local Wolof. Most farmers have phones, but very few have smart phones. We will also be exploring using mobile payment system, and there is potential to combine these two together. Promising solutions will be given a real opportunity to be deployed in the field in a large scale experiment with rigorous field research and impact evaluations funded by MASHAV, Italian cooperation and USAID - this is the real deal!
About the Organisation
Tammy is the Israeli coordinator of the trilateral PAPSEN TIPA project. Ram is a professor of development economics at George Washington university who is leading the USAID funded research and impact evaluation of this project. They both spend substantial amounts of time in the field.