Producers’ commitment to irrigation should be better assessed and encouraged potentially by requiring an up-front contribution to the improvements of the irrigation systems. According to the evaluation, many of the original Water User Association (WUA) members never irrigated through the WUAs, did not pay membership fees, and were subsequently excluded from the WUAs. This left many WUAs reliant on a much smaller user base that irrigated much less land than anticipated. To assess commitment up-front, one approach would be to require farmers to make an up-front payment—framed, for example, as a small co-investment or advance payment of membership fees for the first season. Although it might have been challenging to convince farmers to make this commitment, it would likely have given a more reliable sense of the likely uptake of irrigation than a simple expression of interest that was done in Moldova by farmers at no cost.
Lesson Learned