Discovering Design Principles of Impactful Market Ecosystems for Farmer-Led Irrigation

Today, millions of farmers across Africa, Asia, and South America are proving that affordable micro-irrigation solutions such as drip systems work. By adopting these solutions, farmers are growing more food with less water—and making a profit doing it. But too many farmers still face an uphill battle in accessing effective micro-irrigation solutions.

It takes a dedicated market ecosystem of private and public sector actors, using the right methods and tools, to lower the barriers to adoption for smallholders and deliver on the promise of genuine, inclusive farmer-led irrigation at scale. At iDE, we’ve seen that we can foster better market ecosystems through the application of human-centered design (HCD). 

To that end, The Drip+ Alliance is embarking on a journey to utilize HCD to uncover and codify a set of design principles - unifying considerations that help guide us toward successful strategies and solutions - in farmer-led irrigation ecosystems development.

We’d like to invite interested implementers, researchers, and supporters to join us in this first working session to learn a little about iDE’s experiences using HCD for farmer-led irrigation with our long-standing partner The Toro Company and participate in an interactive session to surface potential design principles for high impact ecosystem development.