At Amsterdam International Water Week, Securing Water for Food: A Grand Challenge for Development recognized 12 new game-changing solutions that will increase water availability and promote efficient use of water in agriculture.
The solutions that won the award include:
- AgroSolar Irrigation Technology – Kenya: Scaling a solar photovoltaic-powered drip irrigation system tailored to the needs of small-holder farmers.
- Aquaponics for Smallholder Farming – Uganda: An aquaponic farming system of simultaneous cultivation of plants and fish. The waste of the fish is used as fertilizer for the plants, increasing efficiency, outputs and incomes for smallholder farmers
- The Buried Diffuser: An Underground Irrigation System -Tunisia: A new underground irrigation technique for trees, shrubs and vegetables in fields and greenhouses that helps save water and energy.
- EcoRangers and Meat Naturally: Communal Grazing System – Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa: A communal grazing system that unlocks economic and environmental potential of rural communities bytrains Eco-Rangers and supports market access while restoring catchment areas.
- Groasis Waterboxx – Jordan: An integrated planting technology that helps restore degraded ecosystems by using fruit, fodder trees and shrubs to cover eroded soils and build up organic matter.
- Irrigation Scheduling System – Peru: An irrigation scheduling system that measures climate factors through a GIS platform and texts or emails farmers with recommendations on when and how much to irrigate.
- mFodder – Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda: Amazon for fodder: A mobile phone and database for small-holder livestock farmers which uses text messaging to outsource for high-quality green fodder usage.
- Mobile Weather Forecasts – Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal: A highly accurate weather forecast model to help farmers in the tropics plan their farming schedule to maximize water availability and improve crop yields to optimize food production.
- NewSil – India, South Africa: A safe, sprayable silicic acid that allows food crops to absorb Silicon, which helps grow more food with less water.
- Slurry Separation System – Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda: A slurry-separation system that reduces the water demands of anaerobic digestion, creates a solid fertilizer, increases gas production, and kills pathogens.
- SWAR: Subsurface Drip Irrigation System – Ethiopia, India: The world’s first sub-surface drip irrigation system that releases moisture when “asked” for it by the crop.
- Waterpads – Ethiopia, Turkey: A biodegradable polymer wrap that absorbs 100 times its own weight of water that helps improve water efficiency.
The awardees will receive between $100,000 and $3 million in funding and acceleration support to bring their innovations to scale
Launched in 2013, Securing Water for Food aims to increase access to innovations that help farmers produce more food with less water, enhance water storage, and improve the use of saline water and soils to produce food.
Over the previous two rounds of Securing Water for Food, the program has saved over 500 million liters of water, produced nearly 2,000 tons of food, and served more than 300,000 farmers and other customers in more than 20 low-resource countries, according to officials.
Rajani Baburajan
editor@greentechlead.com