Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Agricultural Water Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/agwat Paying for privately installed irrigation services in Northern Ghana: The case of the smallholder Bhungroo Irrigation Technology N.A. Akrofi a , D.B. Sarpong a, ⁎ , H.A.S. Somuah a , Y. Osei-Owusu b a Department of Agricultural Economics & Agribusiness, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana b Conservation Alliance, Ghana ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Water conservation Smallholder irrigation Privately installed Willingness to pay Payback period ABSTRACT We assess factors influencing farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) amount for privately installed smallholder ir- rigation systems in Northern Ghana that conserve water for farming. Northern Ghana has a unimodal rainfall pattern that last for three months with a prolonged dry season. We provide insights into smallholder farmers’ affordability of simple irrigation systems fashioned on build-operate and transfer and how long it would take to breakeven to own the system. We add to the largely paucity in the literature in Northern Ghana on smallholder farmer access to irrigation services. Primary data and focus group discussions from farmers was collected be- tween November 2015 and July 2016 in communities where the technology is installed as pilots and in areas noted for floods during the single rainy season and drought in the dry season. The Contingency Valuation Method was used to elicit information on farmers Willingness To Pay Amount. The Tobit regression model estimated the key factors that would influence their WTP amount whilst the simple investment appraisal technique, payback period, estimated the breakeven point. The mean WTP amount from the farmers was GHS180 ($45) per two seasons (a year) per hectare. Given this mean willingness to pay amount, at baseline, the typical group of five (5) maize farmers can afford to pay to own one BIT after 22 years of life of the technology. That notwithstanding, for sustainability of such a project, there is the need for strong farmer based groups to operate and manage the BIT and for the farmers to access farm inputs, access markets and be able to sell their produce at adequate prices to cover costs and to increase their income. Recommendations directed at NGOs, extension institutions, and local government authorities are to intensify training given to farmers on adoption of irrigation technologies as well as strengthening farmer-based organizations for sustainability and management of such technologies. 1. Introduction Water for agricultural production has become dire in dry and semi- arid areas with climatic changes and the need to conserve water for farming has become germane. Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are ex- periencing climatic changes with associated changes in rainfall patterns accompanied by frequent floods and droughts, leading to consequences for already vulnerable people in terms of declining crop yields (FAO, 2008; Umesh et al., 2015). Food crop farmers’ dependence on rainfall for food production has become erratic, sometimes with accompanying flooding, threatening food security and efforts to combat poverty. In- deed, the scarcity of water for smallholder farmer’s crop production is a cause in agriculture’s underperformance in sub-Saharan Africa and is one of the main reasons that Africa lags behind other regions on most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Globally, irrigation development is seen as key in mitigating cli- matic change effects on crop production and important in increasing the utilization of the same piece of land several times in a year, for land- scarce smallholder farm households, thus increasing production and productivity to increase incomes and improving livelihoods. Hasnip et al. (2001) provide a comprehensive literature review on the con- tribution of irrigation to farm households in sustaining rural livelihoods in Bangladesh and Nepal through the security of increased levels of farm productivity, employment and incomes and a fostering of the linkage effects of farm-level irrigation development for the local economy and beyond. Kamwamba-Mtethiwa et al. (2016) and Mango et al. (2018) all assert to the improvements that smallholder farm ir- rigation systems impart to farm level crop productivity, impart to farmer adaptation to climate variability and in enhancing household food security at the farm level. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2019.02.010 Received 31 October 2018; Received in revised form 7 February 2019; Accepted 8 February 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: dbsarpong@ug.edu.gh (D.B. Sarpong). Agricultural Water Management 216 (2019) 284–293 Available online 16 February 2019 0378-3774/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T