By Correspondent
Regional leaders and policymakers from the Eastern and Southern Africa Private Sector Forum on Irrigation convened in Nairobi for a two-day Policy and Regulation Institutional Strengthening initiative to enhance regulatory capacity, strengthen institutional resilience, and promote greater collaboration to address emerging challenges in Africa’s irrigation landscape.
The forum attracted 39 governments and various private-sector players and was convened to identify the key barriers, risks, and market failures limiting private investment in the irrigation sector, informed by the experiences and needs of different private-sector segments.
The forum brought together financiers and regional regulatory bodies to facilitate knowledge exchange, share best practices, and strengthen institutional approaches to policy and regulation in the wider agricultural sector, with food security the players’ top agenda at the irrigation summit.
The host country, Kenya said it will prioritize the transformation of its agricultural sector through irrigation as a way of accelerating implementation of the bottom-up economic model.
Opening the forum, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Water, Sanitation and Irrigation (MWSI), Eng. Eric Muriithi on Monday, made a rallying call to the private sector players and financiers to fund 61 percent of its own ambitious National Irrigation Sector Investment Plan (NISIP) 2025-2035 valued at USD 4.6 billion by 2035.
“Kenya was open for business on matters of irrigation,’ as it seeks to fulfill its NISIP 2025–2035 10-year strategic roadmap meant to expand over 1.5million acres of the country’s available land for irrigation to bolster food security and climate resilience.
“Public financing alone cannot get us there, and it was not designed to. The NISIP is an instrument for rallying the whole sector, government, donors, commercial banks, equipment suppliers, agribusinesses, around one architecture, one accountability framework, and one set of outcomes,” said Muriithi.
The World Bank and IFC are lead partners tasked with actualising the NISIP through K-RISE — Kenya’s Resilient Irrigation for a Sustainable Economy program, whose development is nearing completion according to the CS, with the two–day forum which ends tomorrow forming part of presenting that architecture to the market.
“We are offering financial instrument solutions to help address some of the hurdles in the irrigation sector…we are here to begin a sustained outcome of job creation and farmer empowerment,” said Qimiao Fan, the Division Director, Eastern and Southern Africa Region for the World Bank.
K-RISE has built around three financial instruments, including the Results-Based Finance Facility, which is expected to provide rebates and grants to irrigation equipment dealers, suppliers, and service providers against verified sales and installations — particularly for energy-efficient systems reaching smallholders.
This means that, if an investor sells and installs qualifying systems and reaches its target farmers, the ministry and its partners pay on outcomes. “You expand your market; we get verified coverage,” said Muriithi.
Similarly, the ministry will leverage its targets on the Risk Sharing Facility model to de-risk lending. It provides first-loss and partial credit guarantees to commercial banks, MFIs, and SACCOs that develop irrigation-specific loan products, and the Patient Capital Facility hoped to address the longer repayment horizons that irrigation equipment suppliers and last-mile financiers need.
Member countries confirmed they had identified various irrigation schemes for pilot programmes aimed at increasing agricultural production and opening up new markets for farmers.
