Jordan Water Innovations Technologies

Jordan faces severe water scarcity due to a range of factors, both environmental and socio-economic. This situation is likely to cause social and economic tension in the future. To address this issue, sustainable water management is critical.

ICBA collaborated with Mercy Corps and a consortium of Jordanian partners with decades of experience in implementing innovative water management programs in Jordan and the wider Middle East to support sustainable water management in the country.

The project’s goal was to increase water conservation in Jordan by focusing on water efficiency in the agricultural sector and at the community and household levels. The project aimed to achieve water savings by systematically breaking down barriers to the adoption of water-saving technologies through multiple levels and diverse stakeholders. The major constraints identified were lack of knowledge about water-saving benefits, lack of access to information about water-saving technologies and practices, and lack of access to appropriate financing services.

The project worked to facilitate the uptake of advisory and financing services and used an integrated strategy with a social and behavioral change approach to help a variety of water sector actors to overcome key barriers at individual and institutional levels.

The project adopted a market systems development approach. In line with this approach, ICBA provided technical advisory services to suppliers of new irrigation systems and linked them to potential clients, that is farmers. During the project, ICBA closely followed 52 farmers who adopted new technologies out of a total of 128 adopters. ICBA led the installation of sensor platforms that estimate and validate crop water requirements, and trained national agricultural research staff on the use of the sensor systems and interpretation of the collected data. The project achieved the target of 18 million cu. m. of water savings in five years.