Africa's river systems have been the target of development planners since the 1960s, and many of the major rivers of the continent have been dammed for irrigation, for power generation and flood control. Indeed, river basin development planning has been widely adopted in Africa, and often enough water resource development has come to be synonymous with river basin development (Adams 1992). Integrated river basin planning was pioneered in the U.S., and the basic objective was to co-ordinate water resource development in a given basin so that individual development schemes do not work at cross-purposes. The river basin, and not the individual farmstead, served as the unit of planning, the assumption being that what was good for the basin was good for the individual farm. Such planning exercise requires a powerful interventionist state, a strong central planning authority and an over reliance on physical engineering to solve all development and conservation issues.

River basin planning was adopted in Africa, essentially in truncated form, in part because it appealed to the authoritarian interventionist states that were then in power in many countries in the continent. Moreover, African governments and their willing donor agencies, which bankrolled many of the costly river basin schemes in the continent in the 1960s and 70s, were frequently seduced by the technological promise of large-scale water projects. Planners had high hopes and the objectives frequently sought were:

Ø      to raise the level of food production;

Ø      to increase the production of export crops and hence boost foreign earnings;

Ø      to bring under cultivation what are considered to be unutilised lands;

Ø      to fight against drought and the long dry seasons, both of which exacerbated the problem of food insecurity;

Ø      to meet the energy needs of industry and urban settlements; and

Ø      to satisfy the water needs of urban and rural populations.

 The problem of food security has been keenly felt especially in the Sahel countries and Ethiopia, both of which have become increasingly drought prone. The food crises of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have drawn attention to the issue of environmental vulnerability and the need for its mitigation. In many of the drought prone countries, the concentration of the human population is relatively high and cannot be adequately supported by rain-fed agriculture alone. Thus, where rainfall is insufficient or unreliable, and rain-fed agriculture cannot fully support food production, water management schemes have been considered to be sound investments. Such investments, it is argued, will help stabilise agricultural production and promote food security.

But many water projects in Africa are performing poorly or have failed outright, often with damaging environmental consequences. In many instances, the benefits have gone to a small segment of the urban elite and not to the masses of needy peasants and pastoralists. Some of the reasons for this sorry record include poor planning and design on the one hand, and the lack of involvement of the primary stakeholders in policy formulation and project management on the other (Adams and Grove 1983, FAO 1986, Moris and Thom 1990). The loss of traditional farming and grazing land, population displacement and relocation, and the long term and, at times, irreparable damage to the environment are but some of the costs that communities have had to pay for the failure of water projects (Adams 1992). In Ethiopia, for example, four costly dams that were constructed in the 1980s had to be abandoned, and several irrigation schemes became unusable due to poor planning and the authoritarian approach to policy formulation and implementation that was characteristic of the government at the time (MWR 1997a).

Water is an indivisible resource, and in this sense too it is different from most other natural resources. Water users are thus interdependent, and water control and conveyance systems affect the interests of large numbers of individuals in one way or another. The interdependence of irrigation users, for example, creates an environment in which each user loses a little bit of his or her individual control over farm practices (see Bromley 1982). Some have argued that since water is a common resource and since its utilisation promotes user interdependence, its management should not be left to the responsibility of individuals. Such arguments have often been used as justification, at least in this country, for policies favouring state ownership and management of water projects both large and small.