An interview with Moline Chauruka
Interview by Amanda Gibbins
Moline Chauruka is an irrigation and water engineer with the Department of Irrigation Development in Zimbabwe. She took part in the recent mWater early stages program training in Zimbabwe.
Could you tell me a bit more about the work that's happening in Zimbabwe. I gather there's a lot of focus on dams and irrigation there.
Yes. With the effects of climate change hitting the whole world, Zimbabwe is not an exception. There’s a lot of advocacy for irrigation development, irrigation rehabilitation, and irrigation revitalization programmes. We cannot really separate dam development or dam construction from irrigation, because most of the dams that exist in Zimbabwe are used for irrigation, among other industrial needs. Irrigation is very key, especially now.
As a department, we focus mainly on smallholder irrigation schemes, which are developed for communities in large numbers. We also look at individual irrigation initiatives where individuals develop their own irrigation, but we as a department always come in with technical expertise and technical advice. If they want the irrigation department to design for them, we can do that. But mainly our major focus is those communal irrigation schemes, which are mostly fed from large water bodies such as dams.
Is climate change the reason the dams are needed?
In Zimbabwe, the country is divided into natural regions, classified according to the rainfall amounts received. So we already had regions (IV & V) that receive very little rainfall so cannot sustain rain fed agriculture. Irrigation was mostly concentrated on those regions initially, but the rainy season is now getting shorter with less amounts of rain falling. Now farmers need supplemental irrigation even in those regions where high rainfalls were being received in the past. This gives rise to the increasing need to engage more in water harvesting techniques and technologies, and dam construction is one of such.
Tell me more about the October training with mWater’s team from Uganda
For me personally, it was quite an experience. I'm more a researcher than I am an engineer, so I always try to look into things from a different perspective. Zimbabwe lags behind in terms of technology and I've been working in the Department of Irrigation for quite some time. We tried one time to develop an irrigation schemes database, but somehow, it didn't come out to be an electronic thing. We had the data but in files on paper. So for me this training was a really, really impressive thing. And I liked it. I liked how the training was structured, from the introduction to going to the fields to collecting data, particularly to try and to enter the data on the portal. The visualization process. And the most interesting part of course was trying to design our own survey questionnaires.
Initially the course was more inclined to dam data collection. There was a comprehensive (DRPRT) form for collecting data about the dams. There was no comprehensive form to collect data on irrigation schemes. The form we used just required basic information about an irrigation scheme. But then, during the training, we thought we could improve the irrigation scheme survey form and came up with a comprehensive form, which we can now use to collect data about irrigation schemes.
How did you find working with the Ugandan team?
It was fantastic the way they conducted the training made it so easy to follow. They were so good at delivering information.
Will the training be rolled out across Zimbabwe?
When we had that training in October, they wanted to train one catchment, so that they could see how we can go further with the team. And now we are going to be training the national team. We will be training people from the Department of Irrigation, the Zimbabwe National Water Authority, and the Department of Water. This planning is scheduled for this December. We’ll be trying to share the knowledge that we gained during the training, sharing the importance of using mWater and how we can incorporate this in different government departments. We'll be meeting the bosses to try and convince them on using mWater as a data collection tool and the mWater portal to do our MIS dashboard. So yeah, we are still looking forward to that.
What future uses do you see for mWater in Zimbabwe?
I was thinking that we could use the mwater now to collect data on the irrigation schemes, and come up with a database for provincial irrigation schemes. The starting point towards intervention is always: what data do we have? And from there, we can map the intervention strategies. . I found mWater very useful for capturing the location of irrigation schemes and dams, and images of them, and in turn visualising the data and making sense of the trends.
I really look forward to seeing it succeeding in terms of developing an irrigation schemes database, which we can link to the dams database, so that the MIS dashboard can show for example, an irrigation scheme is being fed by water from this dam or from this river, and the capacity of such a dam can allow expansion of so much hactres in the future or which crops are being grown on an irrigation scheme, and the potential of the water source to sustain another crop with increased crop water requirements.