Kenya country activities | WaPOR, remote sensing for water productivity | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

^{© FAO/Alyne Spencer}

WaPOR activities in Kenya

Kenya is a water-stressed country with a per capita freshwater volume of about 527 m³ while the UN has defined 1000 m³/capita as the threshold for water scarcity. Per capita freshwater availability by 2030 is estimated to further decrease at 475 m³ per year.

Kenya is largely an agricultural economy, with the sector contributing about 34% of the total gross domestic product and another 27% through linkages with other sectors such as manufacturing, distribution, and services. Agricultural production is mainly rainfed, with only about 4% of the total arable land irrigated, 70% of which is irrigated by small-scale irrigation systems. Yet, agriculture is also the largest water user, accounting for about 70% of total freshwater withdrawals.

Project partners in Kenya

🚰 Ministry of Water Sanitation and Irrigation
💧 State Irrigation Department
📈 Water Productivity Improvement
🚜 National Irrigation Authority (NIA)
🌾 Large and Public Irrigation Schemes
🏛️ County Governments (Small Irrigation Schemes)
💧 Small-scale Irrigation Performance Monitoring
📚 Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology
🔬 Service Centre of the WaterPIP Project

Map of pilot areas in Kenya

📍 WaPOR pilot area in Kenya: Mwea irrigation scheme, Tana and Bura, Busia.

Country resources

WaPOR: remote sensing for reducing agricultural water productivity gaps

29/10/2025

Flyer that introduces WaPOR to potential users and to stakeholders involved in the WaPOR project. It sheds light both on the project itself and the portal that contains the data.

WaPOR 2: using remote sensing in support of solutions to reduce agricultural water productivity gaps

06/07/2021

This flyer introduces WaPOR to potential users and to stakeholders involved in WaPOR projects. It sheds light both on the project itself and the portal that contains the data. It is also available in French, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic.

WaPOR for water accounting

04/11/2020

Water accounting is one tool that can assist with facing the challenges related to the sustainable use of our finite freshwater resources and it can be supported by easily-available open-access data. This case study aims to show how WaPOR (FAO’s portal to monitor Water productivity through open access of remotely sensed derived data) data can be used to support water auditing processes at different scales: the basin, the national scale and the subnational/scheme scale.

Water accounting in the Nile river basin

04/08/2020

The Nile River Basin faces a huge challenge in terms of water security. With an expected doubling of the population in the basin in the next twenty-five years, water supply in the basin will be further depleted as demands for agriculture, domestic and industry continues to grow. This report describes the water accounting study for the Nile River Basin carried out by IHE-Delft using the Water Productivity (WaPOR) data portal of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).