Ensuring food security has
become a challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) due to combined effects of
climate change, high population growth, and relying on rainfed farming.
Governments are establishing shared irrigation infrastructure for smallholder
farmers as part of the solutions for food security. However, the irrigated
farms often failed to achieve the expected crop yield. This is partly due to
lack of water management system in the irrigation infrastructure. In this work,
IoT-based irrigation management system is proposed after investigating problems
of irrigated farmlands in three SSA countries, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South
Africa as case studies. Resource-efficient IoT architecture is developed that
monitors soil, microclimate and water parameters and performs appropriate
irrigation management. Indigenous farming and expert knowledge, regional
weather information, crop and soil specific characteristics are also provided
to the system for informed-decision making and efficient operation of the
irrigation management system. In SSA, broadband connectivity and cloud services
are either unavailable or expensive. To tackle these limitations, data
processing, network management and irrigation decisions and communication to
the farmers are carried out locally, without the involvement of any back-end
servers. Furthermore, the use of green energy sources and resource-aware
intelligent data analysis algorithm is studied. The intelligent data analysis
helps to discover new knowledge that support further development of
agricultural expert knowledge. The proposed IoT-based irrigation management
system is expected to contribute towards long term and sustainable high crop
yield with minimum resource consumption and impact to the biodiversity around
the case farmlands.