Water productivity in rainfed agriculture : redrawing the rainbow of water to achieve food security in rainfed smallholder systems; Dissertation, UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft.

The research has been conducted in the semi-arid Makanya catchment of northern Tanzania. It has successfully applied different analytical techniques to better understand soil and water interactions at field scale. It has been successfully demonstrated that there is indeed scope to increase crop water productivity provided the local farmers adopt more efficient cultivation techniques. Substantial yield increases occur as a result of diverting runoff and these further improve when ohter techniques such as ripping, application of manucure and cover cropping are introduced. This confirms no single solution exists to solve the problem of low yields in rainfed farming systems. However, even with the promising results, the research has shown that there is room to further improve the efficiency of crop water use through improvement in research approaches and exploration of better techniques