Different approaches to irrigation should have been taken based on the baseline situation of each irrigation area. The evaluation found that there is a lot of variability between the 10 irrigation systems in terms of number of water users, land consolidation, crops being grown, commitment to irrigation, and capacity to transition to high-value crops. Some systems were better candidates for large-scale irrigation, others may have benefitted from a different approach more oriented towards small-scale farmers, whereas other systems might not have been good candidates for MCC’s investment in increased irrigation at all. Overall, developing system-specific theories of change grounded in each system’s context might have helped the project better support the transition to high-value agriculture in some systems and identify others in which it was unlikely to occur.
Lesson Learned