Together with Ethiopia’s Haramaya University, Unesco-IHE has started a unique master course in an ancient yet nearly forgotten form of water management, called spate irrigation. The first six students started their two-year course in Alemaya last September.

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In spate irrigation, everything works differently. Most irrigation works make use of continuously flowing (perennial) rivers to moisten the crops on an almost continuous basis. Spate irrigation however uses the wild and muddy waters from rivers that appear only sporadically. The sudden floods or spates that rush from the mountains inundate the lands with perhaps as much as a metre of water. Only then crops are sown: cereals and oilseed but also cotton and even vegetables. Typical spate irrigation sites are the arid flatlands at the foot of mountains in South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

“Spate irrigations are among the most fascinating and complex water management systems,” says specialist Frank van Steenbergen, from the MetaMeta consultancy agency. “It’s like a virus: once you’ve been infected with it, you can’t get rid of it.” Rudolph Cleveringa, senior technical advisor with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Rome, shares Van Steenbergen’s fascination: “Once infected with the spate irrigation virus, I began to dig up who-is-who and what-is-what in spate. What was an innovation for me turned out to be a centuries-old, well-balanced system of land and water rights.”

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