Irrigation Performance Assessment Project Cambodia

The yearlong project was implemented between Oct 2019 to Dec 2020. This project is part of the Next Generation Irrigation and Water Management for the Asia-Pacific Program (NextGen Program), an AWP-FAO program aimed at modernizing Asia’s irrigation systems and water management practices.

Cambodia’s economic and demographic development pressures are increasingly adding stress to its seasonal water shortages. Dry season availability has largely been its limiting factor in productivity and thus poses a threat to growth, poverty reduction, and food security. Its effort to expand, rehabilitate, and modernize infrastructures lack prioritization. It lacks any form of comparative system performance in relation to benchmarking of infrastructure against objectives such as water productivity, land productivity, profitability, poverty reduction, and food security.

The project thus developed the performance assessment framework to benchmark irrigation systems in Cambodia. The framework utilizes the recent advances in remote sensing in combination with traditional ground-survey and validation monitoring. The framework is envisaged to be used by Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology (MoWRAM) and the Ministry of Economics and Finance (MEF). By doing so, it is expected to build confidence of investors in water infrastructure projects and prioritize capital works for economic, social, and environmental benefits.

The processes involved in the projects saw integration of the existing FAO Gender Passport, OIBS by IMWI, and SEAGA Irrigation Sector Guide that provide participatory tools to integrate socio-economic and gender issues in the irrigation subsector, to be used in each phase of the project cycle.

The project’s success is built on the groundwork laid during project initiation including establishing key stakeholder relations; and building participatory, robust, and iterative framework. The project initially organized four-day learning tour to Australia as a part of capacity building for Cambodian partners. Activities such as tours to irrigation fields, workshop with Australian partners, application of assessment tools were conducted. Based on the educational tour and participatory approach, a draft irrigation performance framework was developed.

The draft performance assessment framework was piloted in March 2020. The benchmarking framework underwent a phase of trials and testings. The testing was undertaken at the Taking Krasaing Irrigation Scheme in Kampong Thom province, where a range of valuable crops are grown including rice, mango, cashew, bamboo, and rotations of rye and watermelon. The testing included a large-scale stakeholder participation.

For this, the Remote Sensing team, including members of MOWRAM, ITC and the local Farmer Water Users Committee, spent two consecutive days in the field gathering ground-referenced datasets that targeted irrigated and non-irrigated land-uses, and a total of 192 ground-referenced images were collected at the scheme representing fifteen land-classes. When combined with the results of the field survey, the pilot showed considerable promise as a reliable method for measuring performance and guiding investment prioritisation. Based on the robustness shown by the pilot and testing phase, replicability of the framework seems plausible across the Asia Pacific region.

The program is indicative of good practise since it focused not only on the capacity building of the Cambodian partners, but also developed a sense of ownership through various a large-scale stakeholder participation. Moreover, the participation of stakeholders in developing the framework allowed the contextualization of Cambodian ground reality. This is validated by the robustness of the framework during the pilot testing phase. The replicability of the project thus relies on the ability to learn from the best practises while being able to reflect the local conditions for whom the framework is being developed.