Farmers' Behavior and Innovations' Adoption Processes in Rural Sahel: Case of Supplemental Irrigation from Farm Ponds in Burkina Faso

Since 2012, development actors have promoted supplemental irrigation from farm ponds to cope with rainfall variability in Burkina Faso, but few farmers have adopted the innovation. Although harvesting runoff water in ponds is an old practice in Sahelian Burkina Faso, farmers were not accustomed to irrigating crops with stored rainwater. In the context of low adoption rates of innovation, it is useful to understand the behavior and profile of those who do adopt innovations. This article analyzes farmers’ adoption processes by focusing on their socio-economic characteristics and on stakeholders’ social representations of the innovation. We conducted field surveys of 18 institutional actors and 33 adopters. Our results showed that farmers have favorable attitudes towards adoption and that institutional actors help strengthen these intentions by influencing farmers’ social norms and capacities to act, but that the farmers’ perceptions of difficulties, risk, and social norms prevent them from adopting. As supplemental irrigation from farm ponds is a labor-intensive innovation, farmers who cannot call on community labor or hire seasonal workers are limited in their adoption of the innovation. In addition, the fear of being subjected to mockery by members of the community or the fear of losing social prestige is a social norm that may limit the adoption of the innovation. We characterized the profile of adopters, who mainly have a low income but a high social status that allows them to receive support from policy-makers. Farmers have a preference for growing cash crops rather than subsistence crops the latter being the goal of most institutional actors. Our study showed that farmers’ preferences and perceptions of social norms, as well as the characteristics of innovations, are important as socio-economic and technical factors in farmers’ adoption processes.