Tapping In

Hey, Hannatu here 👋

The Congo River dumps 41,000 cubic meters of water into the Atlantic every single second. 

That's enough to irrigate tens of millions of hectares of farmland. Yet almost none of it does.

The Nile runs 6,650 kilometers through eleven countries. Egypt figured out how to use it, and now every hectare of Egyptian farmland is irrigated. 

But the other countries along the riverside just watch it flow by.

The Niger River cuts straight through West Africa, right past farmers who depend entirely on unpredictable rainfall. 

So there’s water literally flowing past their fields. They just can't reach it.

Last week, we showed why irrigation projects across Africa keep collapsing: the money runs out, the pumps break, and nobody agrees on whose job maintainance is. 

This edition is about something different. It's about what happens if we actually get it right.

Let’s start with the biggest one.

The Congo is the world's second-largest river by volume.  

It flows through the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, and touches nine African countries in total. 

The Congo River alone holds enough water to irrigate all of Central Africa. 

But DR Congo's farms are struggling with yields at a meagre 3.4 tons per hectare, a $1.5 billion food deficit, and 26 million people going hungry.

The water is there. The food isn't.

Increasing irrigation by 10% could lead to 50% increased food production in the region. 

Still, the current irrigation development sits at roughly 1% of what's possible, with almost the entire river system remaining undeveloped for agriculture. 

There are two big reasons.

The DRC has been politically unstable for decades, and large infrastructure needs a stable government.  

The terrain doesn't help either. There’s dense rainforest, limited road access, and genuinely hard-to-reach areas, which make construction expensive and slow.

But the water is there, flowing unused.  

But getting from 1% developed to even 10% developed would require investments and political conditions that don't currently exist.

While the Congo's problem is politics and terrain, its neighbor, the Nile, has a much different one. 

It's people.

Egypt built its entire agricultural system around the Nile, and it works. 

The country has 100% of its farmland irrigated through an extensive network of canals, pumps, and distribution systems. 

Nine million hectares under cultivation depend on controlled water distribution from the Nile.

The catch is that Egypt sits at the end of the river, which means it benefits from water that upstream countries have historically left unused. Until now.

Last year, Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the biggest dam in Africa.

The almost $5 billion mega-dam, located in the northwest of the country, will produce more than 5,000 megawatts and is expected to double national electricity generation capacity, according to officials.

Kenyan President William Ruto has also announced plans to sign a power purchasing agreement with Ethiopia based on the resources of the dam project, which he said was a “pan-African statement.”

Everyone seemed to be happy for Ethiopia. Except Egypt.

You see, the Nile flows northward, starting near Lake Tana in Ethiopia, flowing through Uganda, South Sudan, and eventually Egypt before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

Less flow downstream means less water for Egyptian farms, and that's an existential concern for a country that grows food on desert land.

Meanwhile, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi all sit in the Nile Basin. 

Farmers there face dry seasons even though they live near Lake Victoria, the source of the White Nile. Most of them use almost no Nile water for irrigation because the infrastructure simply doesn't exist.

The Nile's politics are complicated because too many countries want the same water. 

Niger, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. Nobody has fought hard enough to use it yet.

The Niger flows 4,180 kilometers through Guinea, Mali, Niger, Benin, and Nigeria, some of West Africa's most agriculturally important regions. 

It cuts straight through the Sahel, which is one of the regions where rainfall is most unreliable and getting worse with climate change.

Farmers along the Niger depend almost entirely on rain, even though the river is right there.

Mali has developed some irrigation schemes along the Niger, particularly around the inland delta. 

One of the biggest is known as Office du Niger, an agricultural scheme spanning over 100,000 hectares located downstream of Ségou. 

It was built in 1938 and still supports intensive rice and sugarcane farming, supporting about 52% of Mali's rice. 

But the total irrigated land remains small compared to what the river could potentially support.

Niger, the country, has almost no irrigation infrastructure, despite the river literally forming its southwestern border. Most agriculture remains rain-fed and vulnerable to increasingly erratic Sahel rainfall patterns.

Nigeria's portion of the Niger River has some irrigation development through the River Basin Development Authorities created in the 1970s. 

But as we said last week, these authorities have been chronically underfunded and have underperformed for decades.

Developing the Niger's potential would need regional cooperation across multiple countries, billions in investment, reliable electricity for pumps, and maintenance capacity. 

The river could genuinely transform Sahelian agriculture. But West African governments have consistently struggled to mobilise the resources to make it happen.

Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake. 

It sits at the intersection of Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It covers 68,800 square kilometers and serves as the source of the White Nile.

Millions of farmers live right on its shores. 

And many of them face water stress during dry seasons when rainfall fails. Their farms sit just kilometers from one of the world's largest freshwater lakes, but they have no practical way to access that water for irrigation.

The infrastructure to move water from the lake to farms barely exists beyond small localized schemes. Large-scale infrastructure that could serve hundreds of thousands of hectares simply hasn't been built.

Building infrastructure to pump and distribute water from the lake requires significant upfront investment that none of the three countries sharing the lake has been able or willing to make. 

The countries have competing budget priorities and limited fiscal resources. Coordination between the three countries adds complexity.

Four water sources. Four different problems. But underneath all of them, the same question: what would it actually take to change this?

Building large-scale irrigation from Africa's major rivers would require several things simultaneously.

Firstly, capital. 

Developing even a fraction of Africa's river irrigation potential would cost tens of billions of dollars. 

This requires governments, development finance institutions, and potentially private investment working together.

Regional cooperation will be required. Especially for rivers that cross borders. 

The Nile Basin has shown us how difficult this cooperation can be. 

Technical capacity is another constraint. Many African countries don't have the specialized engineering expertise domestically and must hire foreign firms, which increases costs.

Most importantly, sustained political commitment. 

Irrigation infrastructure takes decades to build and bring into full operation. 

Political leaders need to commit to projects that might not show results within their term in office. And it's not just about building new infrastructure. Incoming leaders have to commit to maintaining what their predecessors built. 

Farmers should contribute to system maintenance, but fees can't be so high that irrigation becomes unaffordable.

While governments are important, they won't close this gap alone.

A new wave of startups has stopped waiting for the dam to get built.

Instead of solving water access from the top down, they're solving it from the bottom up. One farmer at a time. And they're doing it by repackaging a very old idea: you don't need to own something to use it.

In Kenya, SunCulture sells solar-powered irrigation systems through a pay-as-you-grow model.

Farmers don't pay up front. They pay from the income the system generates. Repayments come from improved harvests, not savings.

Over 45,000 farmers have adopted SunCulture's systems to date. And for them, they’ve seen yields go up by as much as 300%. It’s a business model built around the exact problem that sank government schemes: farmers couldn't afford to pay until the water was already working for them.

In Tanzania and Uganda, Simusolar took a similar bet.

Only 3% of farmers in Tanzania and Uganda had access to irrigation technology when the company started. Most were using diesel pumps.

Simusolar sells financed solar water-pumping systems with payments spread over one to two years, made through mobile money. The company handles delivery, installation, warranty, and maintenance. Everything that government schemes left to rot.

And then there's Stable Foods in Kenya's Homa Bay, right on the shore of Lake Victoria.

The company built infrastructure to deliver water directly from the lake to smallholder farmers, then wrapped it in a subscription model.

Drip irrigation to plots as small as an eighth of an acre, for $5.25 a month. Seventeen cents a day. Farmers who adopted the system saw a tenfold increase in production

What these three companies have in common isn't the technology. It's the insight.

The reason irrigation schemes fail isn't that farmers don't want water.

It's that the system asks them to pay for infrastructure before they can benefit from it, and then leaves them to maintain it alone. These startups flipped that logic. Pay after you grow. We handle the rest.

That model works at the farm level. The question is whether it can work at the scale Africa actually needs.

The startups are proving something important: that farmers will pay for water if the deal is fair. But they often don’t have the capacity to build the Congo River scheme. Or to resolve the Nile Basin dispute. Or invest in infrastructure in the Sahel.

The problem isn’t “no water”, it’s “no infrastructure”. And people are trying to solve different parts of it: governments for the rivers, and startups for the farms.

The gap between the two factions is still enormous. But at least now, both ends are moving.

Are there any startups solving irrigation problems that you know of?

→ Let me know here.

Cheers,