The Gezira Scheme — The Largest Irrigation Project in Sudan Between the Two Niles (1925)
The Gezira Scheme lies in the clay plain stretching between the Blue Nile and the White Nile south of Khartoum. The land slopes gently, and its heavy clay soil retains water, so it could be irrigated by natural gravity flow from the Blue Nile without pumps across most of its network. Because of this geography, the scheme became, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of the largest irrigation projects in the world, and made the Gezira region the most agriculturally productive region in Sudan.
The story began experimentally in 1911, when the British Sudan plantations company tested cotton cultivation in the area, and it was proven that Egyptian long-staple cotton suited it, and the declared aim at the time was to supply British textile factories with the raw material. Work began on the Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile in 1913, then stopped because of the First World War, and the dam was not completed until 1925, which was the year the scheme was officially opened.
From the Sennar Dam branches a network of canals and channels whose length reached about 4,300 kilometres, distributing water to tenancies worked by tenant farmers in partnership with the government and the scheme's administration, and their number is more than one hundred thousand farmers according to Britannica. Cotton was the main crop, and alongside it sorghum, groundnuts, wheat and vegetables are grown, and the scheme also draws its water from the Roseires Dam on the Blue Nile.
In 1950 the administration of the scheme passed from the private company to the Sudanese Gezira Board, so it became a government institution. Then in the early 1960s the Managil Extension was added on the western side, so the irrigated area expanded until it reached about 8,800 square kilometres by 2008, that is about half of the total irrigated land in the country, according to what the published studies of the scheme document.
The impact of the Gezira Scheme does not stop at agriculture: it reshaped the population of the region and its cities, foremost among them Wad Medani, and attracted labour from across the different parts of Sudan, and remained for decades the backbone of cotton exports and of food security. The Sudan Archive at Durham University in Britain holds extensive records on the establishment of the scheme and its administration since 1925, making it one of the most documented and studied colonial and post-colonial irrigation projects in Africa.
📚 Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica — the "Gezira Scheme" entry and the Sudan entry (irrigated agriculture); University of Durham — Sudan Archive, Guide to the Gezira Scheme and its canals (libguides.durham.ac.uk); World Bank — Technical Paper No. 120: "The Gezira Irrigation Scheme in Sudan: Objectives, Design, and Performance". — Editorial Team
