Repeating myself…

Repeating myself…
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

This is a irrigation canal that diverts water from a river into irrigation ditches. Projects like these are almost as common as “carpet weaving” and “gender development” projects here in Afghanistan’s development community. While they all have their place they are all (in my opinion) not implemented as well as they could be, but since I don’t feel like talking about carpets and I just don’t think I know enough to talk about gender development I’ll focus on irrigation.

I feel like am becoming a bit of a broken record by repeating myself about various topics, in this case water usage. I have seen a myriad of projects/organizations (including mine) start irrigation or water infrastructure projects but the vast majority of these projects focus on increasing people’s access to water not helping people use water more efficiently. When I first came here I thought “geeze, this is a country full of water efficiency poster children” but I have studied irrigation a wee bit and it didn’t take more than a day or two to figure out that some of the technologies (as they exist now) that could produce maximum water usage efficiency will not be realistic here for a long time. I believe that there are other steps that could be take like education about how to use water more efficiently but alas, if people are given more access to water they will have little immediate incentive to conserve so education would be a moot point.