Conventional approaches to irrigation development involve large lumpsum investments in big infrastructure that cannot adapt to changing climate and socio-economic conditions. There is an urgent need for alternative ways of investing in smallholder irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) that are adaptive and avoid capital lock-in. Adaptive Investment Pathways (AdIP), inspired by the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP) concept, proposes stepwise investments to support smallholder irrigation development. AdIP builds resilience to future shocks through dynamic and flexible investment plans instead of investing in single static solutions. To develop an empirical grounding for operationalizing AdIP, we draw lessons from three case studies representing different stages of irrigation development along shallow sand river aquifers in Kenya and Zimbabwe. We retrospectively analyse the nature of investments at farm and landscape scales, and the type of risks and opportunities that farmers respond to. We find that in face of risks, farmers diversify their livelihoods, make small investments incrementally especially in response to opportunities and risks created by external triggers, and pause or reorient activity when they reach saturation points, i.e., biophysical or socio-political limits to their development objective, here irrigation development. Governments and external agencies can support smallholder irrigation development in SSA through targeted landscape scale investments that address saturation points faced by smallholders. This requires a robust participatory monitoring framework to identify and respond to saturation points, and a re-thinking of financing mechanisms which do not measure progress against a fixed schedule of investments, but instead measure continuous progress towards the development objective.

In Zimbabwe, farmer-led irrigation is far more widespread than planners and policy makers realise. Along the Shashani sand river, in the arid to semi-arid lands of south-western Zimbabwe, diverse farmer-initiated irrigation ventures exist. This qualitative case study focuses on bucket irrigation, in which very small vegetable fields of up to 450 m² are fenced by tree branches, and irrigated with water from scoop holes in sandy river beds. Farmers initiate and operate their fields with no external assistance. This study presents the benefits of bucket irrigation as an often-overlooked form of farmer-led irrigation development. Through this qualitative and strongly observational study, 26 bucket irrigation farmers and 4 non-irrigators were interviewed using semi-structured interviews where farmers’ perceptions and experiences were captured. We investigate what drives and sustains bucket irrigation, its significance to rural livelihoods under harsh economic and climatic conditions, and the barriers towards scaling this type of farmer-led irrigation development. The results show that drivers for bucket irrigation stem from economic hardship and are gendered. Women are motivated to irrigate mainly by the need to produce vegetables for household consumption, whereas men pursue irrigation due to a lack of employment. Bucket irrigators experience enhanced food security, and have more secure income, contributing to improved wellbeing. Furthermore, despite the desire to scale, the farm size is mainly constrained by fencing and energy for transporting water, which is a result of a persistent lack of financial capital to invest in irrigation technologies. We conclude that bucket irrigation acts as an important livelihood strategy, and that it significantly enhances farmers’ resilience to economic and climatic shocks. Bucket irrigation should not be overlooked in policies that advocate scaling of irrigation. Bucket irrigators have the potential to expand and benefit significantly if supported with innovative financial mechanisms that enable investments in the required technology and knowledge.