Bhoktear Mahbub Khan, a doctoral student at the University of Delaware in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, led a workshop in Nigeria geared toward better understanding the opportunities and challenges associated with scaling up irrigation in Nigeria.

Irrigating Nigeria

Article by Adam Thomas Photos courtesy of Bhoktear Mahbub Khan | Photo illustration by Tammy Beeson July 03, 2024

UD doctoral student and professor hold workshop in Nigeria focused on irrigation

With access to an estimated 9 million metric tons of water from both surface and underground sources, Nigeria is a country with bountiful freshwater resources. Yet, despite the amount of water available to the country, less than 3% of cropland is currently being used for irrigation.

Expanding irrigation in Nigeria would allow farmers to sow seeds and grow crops during dry periods, extend the growing season beyond the traditional rainy season, and help Africa’s most populous country become more food secure.

To help better understand the opportunities and challenges associated with scaling up irrigation in Nigeria, University of Delaware doctoral student Bhoktear Mahbub Khan and Kyle Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, as well as a resident faculty member with UD’s Data Science Institute, recently traveled to Nigeria and held a two-day workshop in Abuja at the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) office. More than 60 delegates from various government offices, non-governmental agencies, universities and farmers participated in the workshop.

The goal was for participants to develop a better understanding of which stakeholders are working on specific areas of irrigation in Nigeria, as well as spatially analyze the distribution of current irrigated croplands and potential water sources to assess the potential for irrigation expansion.

In addition, the workshop participants aimed to pinpoint the most appropriate irrigation methods for small-scale farmers, identify existing political and economic challenges facing irrigation in the country, and explore political and economic mechanisms to overcome those challenges.

The workshop was co-hosted by NASRDA, the University of Delaware, NASA Harvest, a multi-disciplined consortium commissioned by NASA, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and the University of Abuja.

Funding for the workshop came from a Climate Change Hub Graduate Research Enhancement Grant by the Gerard J. Mangone Climate Change Science and Policy Hub at UD.

Khan (standing) leads a workshop in Nigeria geared toward better understanding the opportunities and challenges associated with scaling up irrigation in Nigeria.

Having arrived at UD from Bangladesh in 2022, Khan, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, said he was interested in studying Nigeria because he sees a lot of similarities between the two countries.

“Nigeria and Bangladesh are similar because they both have booming populations and both countries are struggling with food insecurity,” said Khan, who received his undergraduate degree in Agriculture from Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University (BSMRAU) and received his master’s degree in Agroforestry and Environment with a major focus in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing from BSMRAU.

Davis said Khan’s work is “providing a critical foundation of evidence and information that supports stakeholder needs to inform policies in the country. His work is fundamental to helping improve farmer incomes and food security across Nigeria.”

Khan traveled to Nigeria for the first time in 2022 to study the country’s agricultural practices and said one thing he has noticed is that simply clearing more land for agriculture does not necessarily make the country more food secure.

Because some farmers in Nigeria cannot grow enough crops to meet their demand, they are resorting to cutting down trees to clear more land. This negatively impacts the environment, and it also does not achieve the desired goal, which is to provide more food for the population.

“To compensate for a decrease in yield, there are two main ways to do that: Either you intensify growing on the land you already own, or you can extend your cropland,” Khan said. “They have a lot of forests in Nigeria, and what they're doing is they're cutting down trees to make more croplands. By cutting down forests, they ultimately exacerbate the whole situation because forests are vital for keeping the climate in a stable condition. In addition, they might have more cropland but they are not getting enough output so ultimately their food security status is not increasing.”

Khan (center) and assistant professor Kyle Davis (second from left) recently traveled to Nigeria to lead a workshop focused on irrigation.

Khan said food security is not increasing because when the forests are cut down for cropland, they are no longer a source of food for people that may have depended on it.

“The forest is a public property that is not under any private ownership so people can go in and collect fruits, legumes or nuts to eat,” Khan said. “When the same piece of forest is converted into cropland, now it's not a public property anymore. The individual farmer has access to that particular piece of land and maybe his family is getting the benefit, but the overall community is not because he's not sharing the product with all these local people.”

One crucial way to help make Nigeria more food secure while protecting its natural ecosystems is through expanding irrigation in the country, which will be critical for Nigeria to help feed a growing population. With a current population of 218 million people, some estimates show that Nigeria’s population will swell to 400 million people by the year 2050, making it one of the most populous countries in the whole world.

For his research, Khan creates irrigation maps to see the current extent of irrigation and where irrigation could be expanded in the future using remote sensing techniques, downloading satellite data and using different machine learning algorithms to generate maps. But he wants his research on Nigeria to have a real impact on the world, which is why he wanted to invite policy makers, those who can affect change on the ground, to the workshop.

Those policy makers were able to network with one another and see where some of their areas and responsibilities might overlap as it relates to irrigation.

They also had participants draw on maps to identify where irrigation is currently happening and where they could potentially see irrigation expanding in the future. In the end, they came away with 40 paper irrigation maps that Khan will now use as validation points when he uses remote sensing to look at irrigation patterns in Nigeria.

“Some of the maps used really fine data because some people are from a particular place where they know that area very well,” Khan said. “I'll use these as my validation points when I generate my current map and my potential irrigation expansion map. In that way I can say, ‘OK, those are the areas they have identified, and these are the areas that I have found, and then I can compare them.’”