Water Smart Agriculture (WaSA)

WaSA is an approach to efficiently harvesting, storing, and channeling green water throughout the year, regardless of season. Rather than hoping for rain to water fields, rural poor farmers with constrained resources can harvest rain when it comes and use less water year-round. This alone can double incomes for farmers, who no longer have to rely solely on incomes from rainy season farming but can plant, grow, and harvest during the dry season as well.

WaSA is not a new concept. It draws from water-related interventions of well-known approaches, particularly Climate Smart Agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and conservation agriculture. However, WaSA draws attention to access to water for production, including increasing the soil’s capacity to absorb and store moisture (green water), rainwater harvesting and storage, wastewater reuse, and supplementary small-scale irrigation. In doing so, WaSA emphasizes collaboration across the water and agriculture sectors in order to ensure increased investment in smallholder agriculture and efficient use of water for production, with a more pointed goal of increasing water access for production among smallholder farmers, and increasing yields, incomes, food security, and nutrition.