Gezira Scheme
One of the oldest and largest irrigated agricultural schemes in the world under a single management, located in Gezira State in central Sudan, between the Blue Nile and the White Nile south of Khartoum.
The idea began in 1911 when the British agricultural company "Sudan Plantations Syndicate" experimented with growing cotton using pumps, then the construction of Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile was financed with a loan from the British government; work began in 1913 and was disrupted by World War I, and the dam was completed in 1925, so the scheme was officially opened, covering at that time about 240 thousand feddans. It expanded gradually, then the Managil Extension was added to it in the early sixties after the completion of Roseires Dam, reaching its current size of about 2.1 to 2.2 million feddans (about 880 thousand hectares).
The scheme was nationalized in 1950 and became managed through the "Gezira Scheme Board of Directors" as a government institution. It was originally designed to grow long-staple cotton for British textile factories, then diversified after independence, as in the mid-seventies groundnut, wheat and sorghum crops were introduced alongside cotton, and later vegetables and fodder.
It is described in agricultural encyclopedias as the largest gravity irrigation scheme in the world under a single management. More than 114 thousand tenant farmer families live directly from it, about 7 thousand administrators, technicians, engineers and researchers work in it, and it provides seasonal employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands, and remains a fundamental pillar of irrigated agriculture and food security in Sudan.
(Sources: Wikipedia — History of irrigation in Sudan / Gezira State; research paper published in the scientific SCIRP Journal 2023; memorandum of the Alliance of Gezira and Managil Farmers 2013)
— Editorial Team