Sustainable Irrigation Project for Rural Communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

In KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) South Africa, HIV/AIDS has infected over two million people in rural villages, leaving many children unsupported, malnourished, and uneducated. Further exacerbating this problem are high unemployment rates, which cause many adults to seek employment in more urban areas. Elderly women and children are typically the only remaining residents of rural communities in KZN, surviving primarily on subsistence agriculture, which is often limited by inadequate capital for seeds and fertilizer, poor soil, lack of market to sell produce, and a lack of water for irrigation. Although water is locally available, it must often be transported uphill manually by women and children to water the community gardens. Food productivity has been described by many economists as the most important determinant for escaping the poverty trap and achieving economic growth in the developing world. However, poor rural farming communities ironically account for the most food-insecure populations world-wide. Therefore, empowering rural farmers with appropriate technology and sustainable methodologies to enhance their agricultural productivity can only serve to promote the ideals of the UN Millennium Development Goals - poverty alleviation and economic development.

Students in the Johns Hopkins University Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) have embraced the challenge of promoting sustainable agriculture in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Through the introduction of a locally developed `ram-pump' irrigation system to multiple communities since January 2006, students of EWB-JHU in collaboration with partners in KZN have enabled farmers to overcome the challenges of water transportation in a sustainable manner. Furthermore, since the inception of these projects in KZN, EWB-JHU students have observed the “systems” nature of the challenges facing rural communities - interconnected economic, social, and political issues that extend beyond the scope of water problems addressed by sustainable agricultural technologies like the ram pump. These issues are very relevant to the field of operations research, including associated problems such as defining efficient transportation networks for the movement of agricultural goods to local markets, or the development of agricultural cooperatives to improve production efficiency across various communities to promote economic development. To address inefficiencies in marketing and the transportation of agricultural goods - a barrier to the sustainability of community gardens even when water distribution is no longer an issue - EWB-JHU students are currently undertaking research to assess the feasibility of connecting community gardens to various markets based on an input/output analysis. Similar operational research tools would allow researchers to answer other practical problems related to the sustainability of rural agricultural communities and development in general.