Knowledge Exchange for Making Solar Water Pumping (SWP) System Affordable to Small Farmers
Background:
Most of the rain-fed and small holder farmers in Nepal struggle for sustainable irrigation and are dependent on laborious, time consuming and expensive methods of irrigation and livestock watering. Rain, hand pumps, diesel pump sets and manually carrying water limits them to subsistence farming.
Reliable and sustainable water supply should be promoted to bolster agricultural productivity, improved livestock farming, and ensured food security. In this light, SWP systems are proven technology in Nepal that has graduated farmers to commercial farming and improved rural livelihoods. However, this technology has not been adopted widely in lack of knowledge about the technology among market actors of agricultural value chain. In addition, high upfront cost makes the technology unaffordable for farmers.
Our Approach:
Winrock implemented USAID funded Accelerated Commercialization Solar Photovoltaic Water pumping (AC-PVWP) project. Under this project, Winrock successfully installed 76 SWP systems in different part of Nepal for irrigation and livestock watering (fish farming, poultry, cow and pig farming) with affordable business models including lease-to-own model, credit financing model and water entrepreneurship model.
The learnings from AC-PVWP will be applied in this project to provide reliable water solutions and scale-up SWP installation through knowledge exchange workshops, capacity building of farmers,financial institutions (FIs) and policy makers of (rural) municipalities on innovative and appropriate business models, creating linkages of farmers and cooperatives with SWP suppliers , field visits to SWP sites and technology demonstrations for farmers.
Project Objectives:
- Expand knowledge of board members of small farmer cooperatives to make SWP system affordable to their members.
- Establish a platform for knowledge exchange between small farmers to share best practices and encourage them to upgrade into commercial farming.
- Increase financial access to promote SWP system installations.
- Policy advocacy for up-scaling SWP technology and business model.