WIT: Water Innovation Technologies

Project description / objective

Water Innovation Technologies Project (WIT) aims to provide improved knowledge, skills and access to innovative technologies that will help save 18.5 million cubic metres of water usage in agriculture and households by the year 2022.

The project uses the market system approach to help create widespread and lasting adoption of water-saving practices and technologies for agriculture and household use.

Market system focus

1. Agriculture

The largest component of the project involves using market systems to reduce over-use of water on medium-sized farms. The farms are between 20 and 100 hectares of  olive, grapes and stone fruit trees.

Around 350 of these farms are in the current targeted governorates. Research shows that they over-irrigate as much as five times more than is necessary. The programme focuses on improving the market for water-saving irrigation systems and practices.

2. Household

The second primary component of the project focuses on household water-use and leveraging market systems to increase the use of water-saving devices in homes.

This component is focusing on a variety of different technologies. These include working with market actors including water-saving device manufacturers, distributors and users.

Programme interventions

1. Agriculture

Objective
Increasing farmer knowledge and access to water-saving irrigation technologies and best practices.

Interventions

• Using an Investment Fund process to solicit private sector-driven ideas that contribute to addressing identified market constraints. This has included supporting irrigation technology suppliers to increase farmer outreach through on-farm demonstrations, sample giveaways and other activities.
• Addressing a primary market constraint - limited advisory services for farmers specific to irrigation - by offering irrigation technology suppliers a Results-Based Incentive package. The package includes: cost-share for new sales and service engineers; technical and financial support for marketing activities; and other items that will help them offer improved pre and post-sales services to farmers. The package also includes reimbursement to the suppliers for water saved through improved on-farm practices.
• Facilitating the development of irrigation-specific loan products by key formal financial institutions (FFIs). This is to help make it feasible for farmers to invest in improved irrigation technologies. They have hesitated to do this because of the needed investment capital - despite a relatively fast return on investment. The FFIs are then connected to irrigation technology suppliers, government advisory services and farmers to help them increase outreach and improve understanding of irrigation technologies.
• Supporting Jordan’s National Agricultural Research Center (NARC) to increase and improve the information it provides to farmers around irrigation best practices. The project is also working with NARC to develop a weather-based system that will help farmers, through a mobile application, decide when, and how much, to water their crops.
• Providing training directly, and through private training providers, to irrigation suppliers on various topics such as marketing and irrigation system design. This, together with activities to build relationships between farmers and irrigation suppliers, will help to set up the suppliers as technical advisors to the farmers.

2. Household

Objective
Increasing household knowledge and access to water-saving technologies for the home.

Interventions

• Offering technical and cost-share support to companies that offer quality water-saving technologies but that struggle to increase marketing outreach in targeted areas. These technologies include water-saving reverse osmosis water filters, high efficiency toilets, water-saving device suppliers to improve marketing activities to households and plumbers and expand distribution networks to targeted areas.

• Instituting a revolving loan fund operated by community-based organisations in partnership with the Government of Jordan and local suppliers and construction businesses to help make water catchment systems and other water saving technologies more affordable to rural households.

• Supporting community-based organisations to “get the word out” about water-saving technologies. The CBOs were supported to host a series of awareness sessions about the different types of water-saving technologies and their benefits. The project also leveraged the CBOs’ connection to local communities to distribute informational materials such as flyers, SMS messages and social media postings. These activities have helped develop significantly increased demand around water-saving technologies while giving market-based providers of the technologies time to develop their own promotional activities.

• Introducing a new type of in-ground water catchment tank in partnership with an established local plastic tank manufacturer, There are areas where the traditional and preferred type of storage tank is not viable and therefore is not commonly adopted. The new tank is low cost and can work in these areas. Sales of the new product are steadily increasing and the company is strategising new ways to promote it for a wider scale-up.

[Updated October 2020]